White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America (26 page)

This is a crucial first-hand account, for Ligon observed that the white Europeans were being treated differently from the Africans

– they were being dealt with more harshly. The African’s lot was a terrible one, for to be wrenched from homeland to toil for another without the comfort of even a family life is as dreadful a fate as could be imagined. However, for a period of time, it appears that the European was more likely to die an early death in the fields than the African. The climate of Barbados made it particularly unsuitable for unremitting hard manual labour. Ligon tells us that indentured servants were bought on board the ships that brought them and taken straight to the plantations, where they were immediately ordered to make their own cabins. After that, they were put to work in the fields without any time to acclimatise.

If they be not strong men, this ill lodging will put them into a sickness; if they complain, they are beaten by the overseer; if they resist, their time is doubled. I have seen an overseer beat a servant with a cane about the head until the blood has followed, for a fault that was not worth the speaking of, and yet he must have patience or worse will follow. Truly, I have seen such cruelties there done to servants as I did not think one Christian would have done to another.11

187

WHITE CARGO

The plantation owners ranged from the merciful to the cruel,

‘but if the masters be cruel, the servants have very wearisome and miserable lives’, noted Ligon. Food was very basic: potatoes for dinner and loblolly (a kind of gruel or porridge) or bonivist beans or potatoes for lunch. Very occasionally, there might be meat, and that only if a steer had died. It could get cold at night. With no bedclothes to keep the chill from a servant’s hammock, and having to sleep in the shirts and drawers in which they worked, ‘a cold taken there is harder to be recovered than in England by how much the body is enfeebled by the great toil and the sun’s heat . . .’

This, then, was the island home to many thousands of displaced English, Irish and Scots. Long lines of labourers would clear the tropical forest, then plant the cane. Harvesting was particularly backbreaking work, for the best part of the cane was near the root and so the plant had to be cut close to the ground. Overseers ensured regimented efficiency. It was unrelenting work in an unyielding climate. Under the tropical sun, it must have been a most terrible place in which to labour day after day with little respite and with frequent applications of the lash. For the Irish, it must have been especially unpleasant to find themselves under a regime that was designed and administered by Puritans and Cromwellians, who would have seen their Irish Catholic workers as the enemy not only of their country but also of their religion. The reasons for cruelty therefore existed on three levels: identity, religion and commerce.

The treatment of white bonded-slaves in the Caribbean caused concern to some of those in authority. In 1651, Barbados passed a law saying that no merchant should send a servant under fourteen years of age without the written permission of a guardian or person in authority. This was ignored. A few years later, a Colonel William Brayne wrote a letter to Oliver Cromwell from Jamaica saying that the planters should employ Africans. The reasoning was that ‘the planters would have to pay for them and would have an interest in preserving their lives, which was wanting in the case of bond servants’. Such observations by the colonel and others led to tens of thousands of Africans being shipped into Barbados in the middle of the century.

The civil wars in England had far-reaching effects on the tiny 188

‘BARBADOSED’

island of Barbados. It is estimated that between 1648 and 1655, 12,000 political prisoners arrived as a result of the conflict.

Deported Royalist prisoners were sold as bonded slaves. Rank was no safeguard. In 1656, two Royalist officers named Rivers and Foyle wrote: ‘The Master of the ship sold your miserable petitioners and the others . . . for 155lb weight of sugar apiece (more or less according to their working facilities).’ In a petition to Parliament, they described:

this insupportable captivity . . . grinding at the mills, attending furnaces, or digging in this scorching island, having nothing to feed on . . . but potato roots . . . being bought and sold from one planter to another, or attached as horses and beasts for the debts of their masters . . . 12

In 1659, an impassioned debate erupted in Parliament over the plight of Rivers and Foyle. Sir Arthur Haslerigge, one of the five MPs whose attempted arrest by Charles I had hastened the onset of the English Civil War, confessed that when he heard the petition read out, he had almost wept: ‘Our ancestors left us free men.

If we have fought our sons into slavery, we are of all men most miserable.’13 Despite such sentiments, Rivers and Foyle received no redress.

Apart from the Royalist prisoners, wealthy Royalist refugees also turned up on the island. They saw it as a bolt-hole in which to escape the revolution being forced along by Cromwell and the Parliamentarians. This tipped the political scales in Barbados significantly towards the Crown. However, the pragmatism shown by the merchants and planters enabled them to continue their trade without significant political strife.

This happy state of affairs could not last. When Charles I was beheaded, the island declared itself for Charles II. Parliament was quick to respond. All trade with the island was suspended.

Likewise, all trade between Barbados or any other English colonies or Dutch ships was forbidden. By this manner, England got a stranglehold on Atlantic trade and held the tiny rebellious isle of Barbados to book. A military force was sent to ensure that the 189

WHITE CARGO

island toed the line. After some skirmishes, the island continued to hold out against the forces of the Commonwealth. Sir George Ayscue, who commanded the Parliamentary forces, wisely decided that the policy of divide and rule was the way forward. It worked: after several prominent Barbados citizens and their troops went over to the Cromwellian side, the game was up for the mouse that roared. In January 1652, Barbados surrendered.

The planters of Barbados had one important piece of work still to do so that their labour system would run smoothly and without hindrance. They required a code to set down the exact nature of the relationship between master and servant. The assembly set about its essential task, saying it was ‘much feared that some persons within this island have exercised violence and great oppression to and upon their servants through which some of them have been murdered and destroyed’. This last statement was no doubt true, for as in Virginia there were tales of servants buried in shallow graves. The Act for the Ordaining of Rights between Masters and Servants came into being in 1661. As with so many drear documents throughout history, it had pretensions to be something other than what it was. Yet it was an ordinance of such stringency that one might be forgiven in not understanding that those to whom it applied already existed in conditions of forced labour.

Article One of the new act began well by banning the importation of children – but only if they were English. Irish and Scots children could still be imported. Article Two laid down that for those under eighteen years of age, indentures should not exceed seven years; for those over that age, five years. Article Three logically stipulated that servants could not trade – for how could a chattel run a business?

After these ‘reasonable’ conditions, the act laid down some sanctions, taking its cue from Virginia and Maryland. In some respects, the new laws were harsher than those in America, in others less so; but all were draconian. Laying a hand on a master or mistress: one extra year. Stealing so much as a loaf of bread: two extra years. Marrying without the consent of one’s master: four extra years. A pass system was encoded – absence without consent from the plantation at any time inside or outside work hours: one year for every two hours. Trying to escape: three 190

‘BARBADOSED’

extra years. A servant becoming a father: three more years.

This document became the blueprint for the Slave Code of 1688, enacted to control the lives of forced labourers from Africa.

This should surprise no one, for what was the 1661 act other than a slave code in itself?

By the mid-1660s, a high proportion of the working population in Barbados was Irish. Some of what we know of the population of the Irish in the Indies and their condition comes from the priests who travelled to minister to them. According to Father John Grace, 12,000 Irish lived in Barbados and surrounding islands. He also reported 600 Irish slaves in a small island off St Christopher. An official observer, whose report is preserved in state papers, reported that in 1667 Barbados had no more than 760 ‘proprietors’ and 8,000 effective men, of which ‘a very great part Irish, derided by the negroes as white slaves . . .’

The same observer noted that on plantations he had seen at any one time ‘thirty or forty English, Scotch and Irish at work in the parching sun, without shirt, shoe, or stocking; and negroes at their trades in good condition . . .’14 How long these so-called servants would have survived in such conditions is anyone’s guess.

There were recurring rebellions. In 1649, a major slave uprising was put down only because an African slave girl informed upon the mutineers. On the island of St Christopher, Irish deportees rebelled in 1666. The following year, the Irish on Montserrat rebelled. The English authorities hanged up to 400 rebels.

In 1675, after a series of conspiracies and disturbances in Jamaica, martial law was declared. In the same year in Barbados, a major rebellion by Africans was planned across a large number of plantations. The plot was foiled and 110 slaves were charged with conspiracy. The conspirators knew what awaited them if found guilty. Five took their own lives before they were brought to trial.

Fifty-two slaves were executed in the most brutal fashion, six being burned alive and eleven beheaded.

A later plot involving both Irish and African slaves in Barbados was also quashed. Twenty Africans were executed but the Irish were allowed to go free. A further conspiracy by Africans to take over the entire island was uncovered and foiled. Uprisings continued 191

WHITE CARGO

in Jamaica and other colonies, including New York, for a hundred years and more.

In Barbados, the landowners’ perennial fear of mass rebellion by Irish and Africans combined was to lead to the exclusive use of African labour. By the middle of the 1600s, the European bonded slave labourer was beginning to play a diminishing role in West Indian agriculture.

They were moved on to other tasks, becoming agricultural overseers and factory workers. African labour cost less and was generally less troublesome. In 1684, a census showed the population of Barbados consisted of 20,000 whites and 46,000 blacks. When slavery was abolished in 1834, there were 15,000 whites and 88,000 blacks. But European labourers continued to arrive.

To this day, there are people in Barbados with Irish names known as ‘Red-legs’ because of their blistering skin: not much to be remembered by for so unhappy a history. Even though the role of the European labourer both grew and began to decline within the seventeenth century, as we shall later recount, early in the next century the Irish legal system would develop to ensure a continued source of almost free Irish labour for the plantations.

In the meantime, increasing wealth brought consolidation of political power for a planter elite. Drax Hall and one or two other Jacobean mansions stand as monuments to the sugar industry and the beginnings of industrial capitalism. Though slaves continually resisted their bondage, and indentured servants rebelled from time to time, the control of the powerful planters remained effectively unrivalled until the nineteenth century.

There was one final twist in the status of white and black slaves in Barbados. By the last decade of the seventeenth century, the Irish had become so rebellious and mistrusted by the authorities that African slaves were recruited into the very militia that had the task of putting down slave rebellions. Africans carried arms to police both other Africans and their European colleagues in servitude.

It would appear that the white indentured labourer had by now outlived his usefulness in the West Indies or elsewhere – but it was not so. A well-paying racket is hard to kill off.

192

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE GRANDEES

In Virginia, more than 2,000 miles away from Barbados, most of the indigenous population had been cleared from the Tidewater, on the eastern shores of the Chesapeake, and the world of the Virginia grandee was being constructed. In the middle decades of the seventeenth century, roots were laid down for an aristocracy that would dominate Virginia for 200 years. Men whose descendants would include some of America’s most revered leaders were busy building their fortunes – the first Washington, the first Maddison, the first Lee.

These big planters were concentrated along the necks of land between the four rivers of the Tidewater, where tens of thousands of acres had become personal fiefdoms. Each was a self-sufficient mini-colony with its own wharf, tobacco warehouse, forge and a village of wood-framed dormitories and dwellings where one man’s word was law.

The centrepiece of the mini-colony was the ‘big house’, the planter’s mansion. One of the first mansions, built in 1665, still stands. Known as Bacon’s Castle, after a man who would shake Virginia to the core, it is a brick Jacobean manor house with all the baroque trimmings you might find in England. As the years passed, such mansions would be replaced by still grander Georgian edifices, as the planter elite consciously projected itself as a natural aristocracy.

193

WHITE CARGO

It was not just their wealth that endowed them with superior pretensions. Many could claim an aristocratic lineage back in England. The typical grandee was the younger son of English gentry who arrived in the Chesapeake a wealthy, well-connected man already. Some historians argue that their attitudes to white servants and, later, to black slaves reflected the English aristocracy’s disdain for the servile classes.