Free Coloreds in the Slave Societies of St. Kitts and Grenada, 1763-1833 0870494147, 9780870494147

Citation preview

Free Coloreds in the Slave Societies of St. Kitts and Grenada,1763-1833 Edward L. Cox

In 1830 Grenada had a slave population of almost 24,000, with another 4,000 free blacks and only 761 whites. How could slavery have persisted under such demog¬ raphic conditions? Edward L. Cox ex¬ amines this question and others as he traces the fate of free coloreds on Grenada and St. Kitts, focusing on the crucial seventy-year period that preceded eman¬ cipation. Cox shows that the frequency and ease with which slaves obtained freedom did not necessarily correlate with improved status for free coloreds or with improved race re¬ lations. His account reconstructs contem¬ porary patterns of society on both islands and analyzes the dynamics of black and white interaction.

(Continued on back flap)

Free Coloreds in the Slave Societies of St. Kitts and Grenada,1763-1833

Edward L. Cox

Free Coloreds in the Slave Societies of St. Kitts and Grenada,1763-1833

COPYRIGHT ©

1984

BY THE UNIVERSITY OF TENNESSEE PRESS / KNOXVILLE. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA.

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies

from funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

THE PAPER IN THIS BOOK MEETS THE GUIDELINES FOR PERMANENCE AND DURABILITY OF THE COMMITTEE ON PRODUCTION GUIDELINES FOR BOOK LONGEVITY OF THE COUNCIL ON LIBRARY RESOURCES. BINDING MATERIALS HAVE BEEN CHOSED FOR DURABILITY.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Cox, Edward L., 1943Free coloreds in the slave societies of St. Kitts and Grenada, 1763-1833. Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Slavery—Saint Kitts. 2. Slavery—Grenada. 3. Saint Kitts—History. 4. Grenada—History. I. Title HT1105.G84C69 1984 305.8’96'072973 ISBN 0-87049-414-7

83-14646

To Paula

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/freecoloredsinslOOOOcoxe

Contents Preface 1. Introduction

page xi 3

2. Demographic Patterns

10

3. From Slavery to Freedom

33

4. Free Coloreds in the Economy

59

5. Revolution on Grenada, 1795-1796

76

6. Civil Rights

92

7. Religion and Education

111

8. The New World Perspective

132

9. Assessment and Evaluation

147

Notes

157

Bibliography

179

Index

190

Tables, Figures, and Maps TABLES

2-1 Population of St. Kitts, 1756-1831

13

2-2 Population of Grenada, 1763-1833

14

2-3 Slave Population of Grenada and St. Kitts, 1817-1831, Showing Births and Deaths

18

2-4 Population Growth on Grenada and St. Kitts, 1763-1830

20

2-5 Population of Grenada, 1812, 1816, 1820, 1824, by Age

22

2-6 Population of Grenada, 1763-1830, by Sex

24

2- 7 Population Distribution According to Parishes on Grenada, 1812, 1820, and 1830, and on St. Kitts, 1812

30

3- 1 Manumissions Effected by Bequests, Purchase, or Otherwise in St. Kitts and Grenada, 1808-1821

39

3-2 Slaves Manumitted on Grenada and St. Kitts, 1815-1831, as a Percentage of Total Slave Population

40

3-3 Manumissions on Grenada and St. Kitts, 1815-1831, by Sex

41

3-4 Age Distribution of Manumittees: Grenada, 1820-1826, and St. Kitts, 1817-1825

46

3- 5 Manumissions by Color and Age: Grenada, 1820-1826

49

4- 1 Free Colored and White Plantation Owners in Grenada, 1772, by Number of Acres Owned

60

4-2 Land Use of Free Coloreds, Grenada, 1772

63

4-3 Frequency Distribution of Income on St. Kitts, 1801 and 1811

72

7-1 Methodist Membership, Grenada and St. Kitts, 1813-1833

114

7-2 Population Distribution of Methodists, St. Kitts, 1825 and 1830, by Stations

115

7-3 Estimated Church Attendance and Communicants, Grenada and St. Kitts, 1830

119

7-4 Anglican Baptisms and Marriages, Grenada, 1788-1820

120

7-5 Marriages, Grenada and St. Kitts, 1808-1830

121

7-6 Enrollment at the Central Schools, Grenada, 1825-1833

124

7-7 Parochial Distribution of Children Attending Central Schools, Grenada, 1826, 1827, 1829

125

7-8 State of Daily Public Schools for Free Persons, Grenada and St. Kitts, 1830

126

7-9 Enrollment at Free Public Schools in Basseterre, St. Kitts, 1825-1830

127

10 State of Sunday Schools on Grenada and

St. Kitts, about 1828-1832

128

FIGURES

3-1 Manumissions on Grenada, 1815-1831, by Sex

42

3-2 Manumissions on St. Kitts, 1815-1831, by Sex

43

3-3 Age Distribution of Manumittees: Grenada, 1820-1826, and St. Kitts, 1817-1825 3-4 Manumissions on Grenada, 1820-1826, by Color and Age

45

48

MAPS

1. The Caribbean

2

2. St. Kitts in 1830: Parochial Divisions

26

3. Grenada in 1830: Parochial Divisions

27

Preface Since the late Frank Tannenbaum published his seminal work Slave and Citizen, there has been renewed interest in the study of com¬ parative New World slavery.1 While scholars such as David Brion Davis, Gwendolyn M. Hall, Carl N. Degler, Elsa V. Goveia, and Herbert S. Klein have attempted international or intranational com¬ parisons of slavery, others, like Orlando Patterson, Franklin W. Knight, Peter H. Wood, and Gerald W. Mullin, have concentrated on individual territories in presenting case studies of slavery during specific periods of time.2 Thus, over the past fifteen years or so our knowledge and understanding of New World slavery have greatly increased. Equally important are studies of a different sort in which the focus of attention is the free colored group within the society. These studies have all been partly instigated by the Tannenbaum thesis, which saw a causal relationship between the ease and frequency of manumis¬ sion, on the one hand, and the relative mildness of slavery, on the other.3 An examination of the free colored group in any slave society thus seems to be a pertinent test of Tannenbaum’s argument and essential to an understanding of the full dynamics of the slave system. The comparative work edited by David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene was followed by Jerome S. Handler s study of Barbados, Ira Berlin’s work on the antebellum southern United States, and more recently, separate monographs on Jamaica by Mavis C. Campbell and Gad J. Heuman.4 According to Cohen and Greene, a study of free coloreds permits us to shift the traditional focus of inquiry of slave societies “from the letter of law and tradition to the reconstructable conditions of slav-

xi

Xii •

FREE COLOREDS OF ST. KITTS AND GRENADA

ery.”5 Yet Barry Higman finds it useful to hold the metropolitan framework constant and study the society chronologically by the stage of the island’s settlement so as to allow us to consider the changing attitude of planters and slaves. This study of free coloreds on the British islands of Grenada and St. Kitts between 1763 and 1833 uses Higman’s framework in examining the group at a critical though dif¬ ferent stage in the development of each island.6 In addition, Grenada with its inherited French population offers a further point of contrast with St. Kitts, which was predominantly British. While the works cited above are important contributions to a grow¬ ing body of literature on the free coloreds in the Americas, scholar¬ ship on this group in the British Caribbean has not only centered almost exclusively on the larger territories but, more important, has tended to concentrate on the post-1800 period.7 The result is an unbalanced view of the position of the free coloreds in the Caribbean as a whole. In the first place, using findings from the larger territories to make generalizations about groups on smaller islands without due regard for territorial variations could conceivably lead to faulty con¬ clusions. Second, the emphasis on post-1800 free coloreds—useful though the studies are—has presented a picture of the group frozen in time and has obscured from our vision a free colored community undergiong change at the end of the eighteenth century when the onslaught of humanitarian forces produced a general militancy among free coloreds and an eventual improvement in their position. The present study seeks to fill this void. Overall research for this project was generously supported by a Graduate Assistantship from the Johns Hopkins University' and grants from the American Philosophical Society and the University of South Carolina through its Research and Productive Scholarship Fund. I am deeply appreciative of the many courtesies extended to me by the librarians and attendants at the Public Record Office, British Museum, Senate House Library at London University, Rhodes House Library at Oxford University, Church Missionary So¬ ciety, Royal Commonwealth Society, and a host of other depositories in London that are too numerous to mention individually. I would also like to extend special thanks to the librarian and other staff at the Grenada Public Library, the staff at the Government Archives of both Grenada and St. Kitts, and officials in the Anglican and Methodist churches on both islands. Some of the material in chapter 5 appeared in the Journal of Negro History 67 (1982). I wish to thank the Association for the Study of AfroAmerican Life and History for allowing me to use this material. I have learned much through conversations and correspondence with colleagues over the years. Jerome Handler’s The Unappropri-

PREFACE

• xiii

ated People: Freedmen in the Slave Society of Barbados (Baltimore, 1974) helped sharpen the focus of some of the questions I raised. Arnold Sio, Franklin Knight, and Colin Palmer read the entire manu¬ script at different stages and offered useful suggestions for its im¬ provement. Richard Sheridan cast a critical eye on some of the mate¬ rial in chapter 5. In addition to providing incisive comments to earlier drafts of this study, Jack P. Greene was a source of inner strength for me at every stage of my graduate career. Joanne Ainsworth, of the Guilford Group, Mavis Bryant, and Jennifer Siler patiently worked with me during the latter stages of the book’s production. Polly Brown, Carla Burton, and Lori Standiford graciously did the typing. The errors that remain are entirely my own. My greatest debt is to my wife, Paula. She not only encouraged the project all the way but also painstakingly critiqued everything I wrote. This book is dedicated to her.

Free Coloreds in the Slave Societies of St. Kitts and Grenada,1763-1833

Oxford University Press, Inc. Reprinted by permission.

THE CARIBBEAN

1 Introduction During the second half of the eighteenth century, political and economic power on both Grenada and St. Kitts was exercised by a local oligarchy of planters in the elected Assembly. In conjunction with the officials and appointed members of the Council, these men passed laws necessary for the conduct of the daily affairs in each territory. The laws of the local legislatures were, of course, subject to veto by the imperial Parliament, but members of the local oligarchies through their collective actions and individual examples greatly af¬ fected the nature of the society. In response to the demands of an expanding plantation society following the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht, which recognized the British claim to the French portion of the island, St. Kitts planters quickly put all of the best land available into the cultivation of sugar, and an infrastructure was created to facilitate the importation of African slaves to work on these plantations. So successful was this policy that by 1756, when the island’s white popu¬ lation stood at 2,783 and the slaves numbered 21,891, overall sugar production on St. Kitts had outstripped that of Antigua, though soil exhaustion was taking place and the island’s capabilities for signifi¬ cantly increasing its sugar production thereafter were seriously lim¬ ited.1 Grenada’s demographic and economic characteristics in the pre1750 period differed markedly from those of St. Kitts. Like other French colonies it experienced all the frustrations resulting from the protectionist economic practices of the French government. The prohibition on trade with foreign powers, even when much-needed plantation supplies were not readily forthcoming from French sources, hindered the colony’s growth.2 The gradual relaxation of 3

4

•

FREE COLOREDS OF ST. KITTS AND GRENADA

restrictive policies in the early eighteenth century induced planters to increase their cultivation of sugar, cocoa, coffee, and cotton. The population grew correspondingly between 1700 and 1753, the number of whites increasing from 257 to 1,262 and the number of slaves from 525 to 11,191. The three sugar estates in 1700 seemed a minuscule number compared with the eighty-three in 1753. Grenada obviously was only then at the brink of an economic transformation that St. Kitts had undergone by the end of the seventeenth century.3 Planters of St. Kitts and other well-established British Caribbean territories viewed with mixed feelings the addition of Grenada and other ceded territories as British colonies after the 1763 Treaty of Paris. To the adventurous, these new territories offered the oppor¬ tunities for more land and ultimate economic prosperity. By contrast, those unwilling or unable to migrate stood helplessly by in the face of increasing competition for a share of the European market from these territories that could produce relatively low-cost sugar. In quest of previously uncultivated land or estates abandoned even before for¬ mal cession of Grenada, immigrants arriving from Antigua, Bar¬ bados, and St. Kitts immediately transformed the island economi¬ cally. By 1772, the 166 newly arrived settlers (old British subjects) and 139 French residents (new British subjects) owned some 334 planta¬ tions on which were employed 26,211 slaves. Of the total 46,261 acres then under cultivation, 32,011 were devoted to sugar and the re¬ mainder were devoted to coffee, cocoa, and indigo. Ninety-five wa¬ ter, twelve wind, and eighteen cattle mills were then in use.4 In a real sense, then, Grenada’s sugar revolution took place between 1763 and 1775, and the colony’s exports by the latter year were valued second only to Jamaica among Britain’s Caribbean possessions. Political and social problems detracted somewhat from the island’s rather rosy economic picture. Those white French settlers who re¬ mained on St. Kitts after 1728 apparently caused minimal ethnic problems for the ruling British majority. In contrast, those who re¬ mained on Grenada after 1763, having initially “showed content¬ ment because of the “liberal toleration with which it was intended they should be indulged,” soon became disenchanted.5 Obviously they hoped to be treated as equals to the old British subjects. This expectation clearly did not take into account the traditional antiRoman Catholic discriminatory practices in Britain, evident in offi¬ cial instructions given to Governor Robert Melville when he was appointed governor of the island. Melville’s eventual summoning of an Assembly in 1766 to vote on taxes for necessary expenditures exposed the delicacy of the political situation. The minoritycontrolled Assembly of old British subjects severely limited the vot¬ ing privileges of the new British subjects and thus laid bare the sharp

INTRODUCTION

•

5

division of the society into old and new subjects, British and French, Anglicans and Roman Catholics.6 The indecision exhibited by Colonial Office officials and local ad¬ ministrators in handling this vexing problem in subsequent years served to destabilize further the island’s political climate. In 1768, local officials began appointing new British subjects as councillors and allowing them special voting privileges for which, as Roman Catholics, they were otherwise ineligible. To the consternation of old British subjects, these patently extralegal practices obtained sanc¬ tion from imperial authorities four years later. By subsequently chal¬ lenging the validity of legislation in which the new subjects had participated and complaining of other extraordinary privileges and indulgences that they enjoyed, the old subjects eventually forced the authorities to adopt a decisive stance regarding the political status of these new subjects.7 Not until 1793 was the issue linally resolved when a Privy Council ruling upheld the 1763 instructions and invali¬ dated all subsequent concessions to the new subjects. This ruling represented a victory for the old British subjects, who had never for a moment doubted the validity of their claim. Yet rather than solving immediately and permanently Grenada’s nagging political problem the ruling may have contributed directly to a rebellion in 1795 by the island’s free coloreds led by Julien Fedon.8 Throughout the greater part of the eighteenth century, then, planters on Grenada and St. Kitts, in common with their counterparts in other British Caribbean territories, enjoyed a free hand in determining how society should be ordered. Although some new British Carib¬ bean colonies (St. Lucia, Trinidad, Demerara, Essequibo, and Berbice) were essentially Crown colonies without legislatures, all the older colonies, including those ceded to Britain in 1763, had their own locally elected legislatures that exercised de facto control over internal affairs. Prior to the 1790s, none of these legislatures, all of which were controlled by local planter interests, had done anything to improve the lot of blacks-free or slave-within its borders. The availability of a seemingly endless supply of workers from Africa had prompted planters to purchase as many slaves as they needed and work them to death. While king sugar reigned and the powerful West India lobby successfully influenced the British Parliament in favor of planter interests, slaves and free coloreds worked and died under a sociopolitical system that seemed to offer them little scope or hope for self-improvement. Between 1797 and 1817, however, three landmark legislative actions—the Comprehensive Slave Acts, Slave Trade Abolition Act, and Slave Registry Acts—signaled the waning of planter authority over the islands’ internal affairs and demonstrated

6

•

FREE COLOREDS OF ST. KITTS AND GRENADA

the growing assertiveness of the metropolitan government in ad¬ ministering its colonies. Both of these trends can be traced to the era of the American Revolution, when the dependence on Britain of the West Indian colonies was recognized by all.9 The Comprehensive Slave Acts, passed reluctantly by the legisla¬ tures of Grenada and St. Kitts in 1797 and 1798, respectively, were the products of a decade of imperial prodding. By 1780 the atrocities perpetrated by local whites on slaves were receiving greater atten¬ tion in Britain than ever before. Both the British Parliament and the public were prodded into action by the activities of the “Saints, a British group who campaigned against slavery on religious and humanitarian grounds. The scathing condemnation of British Ca¬ ribbean slavery by one of their members and a long-time resident of St. Kitts, James Ramsay, was more than the planter interest could adequately defend. In addition, Thomas Clarkson’s painstaking com¬ pilations of the high mortality rate among slaves in the “middle pas¬ sage induced Parliament to initiate its own investigation into the slave trade in 1788.10 Because of the unflattering exposure of the nature of slavery and the slave trade, British officials attempted, unsuccessfully at first, to induce local legislatures to eliminate some of the worst abuses. Responding to mounting parliamentary pressure in the face of limited positive colonial response to imperial recom¬ mendations, officials at the Colonial Office finally persuaded the gov¬ ernors to impress on local legislators the necessity of passing the Comprehensive Slave Acts. The acts passed on both islands asserted the need to keep slaves in bondage until their knowledge and industry had increased suffi¬ ciently to make them “fit” for emancipation.11 Certain minimum standards of food, clothing, housing, and other general slave mainte¬ nance were recognized as the masters’ responsibility; aged and infirm slaves were to receive adequate care and attention, and restrictions were placed on the whipping of slaves. Lest owners attempt to man¬ umit indiscriminately slaves who would be economic liabilities if the above standards were maintained, legislators in both territories committed themselves to charging manumission fees of varying amounts. In addition, because prevailing sentiment was that the supposed absence of monogamous unions among slaves impeded natural population growth, provision was made for religious instruc¬ tion, which, it was thought, would uplift their morals and thus pro¬ mote stable’ unions.12 By reluctantly passing the acts, planters in both territories hoped to lessen eventually their dependence on slave importations and at the same time to deflect the attention of abolitionists. Rather than heading off debate on the slave trade, the Comprehen-

INTRODUCTION

• 7

sive Slave Acts merely gave the weakened planters a brief respite. The approval by Parliament in 1807, despite planter opposition, of a bill abolishing the slave trade posed a critical test for the local oligar¬ chies, which had effectively made dead letters of the liberal provi¬ sions of the Comprehensive Acts. The notorious cases of two St. Kitts priests, the Reverends William Davis and Henry Rawlins, highlight their reaction. Davis, an attorney on an estate, beat a slave to death in 1813. The only punishment meted out to him was a censure from the governor that his conduct was “unbecoming the sacred character of a clergyman. With seemingly wry humor, a coroner’s jury ruled five years later that a runaway slave who had met death after receiving a flogging from Rev. Rawlins had died as a result of a “visitation of God. 13 Little wonder that imperial authorities felt compelled to intervene directly in colonial aflairs in order to change the situation of the nonwhite population. A general registration of slaves, proposed in Rritain in 1812, was certainly one step in this direction. Registration would help in enforc¬ ing the Abolition Act by facilitating the detection of illicit slave im¬ ports in any territory. In addition, it was argued, if masters knew that systematic records were being maintained of vital statistics of the slave population, they would improve the slaves’ conditions.14 We may never know for sure why Parliament backed down from its av¬ owed intention of transmitting to the colonies for their adoption model legislation regarding registration. In any case, a compromise was finally worked out and the legislatures of Grenada and St. Kitts, under extreme duress, enacted registration laws, as did other Carib¬ bean colonies, embodying the general philosophy of earlier Colonial Office proposals.15 The Slave Registry Acts in both territories specified the manner in which records concerning the vital statistics of the slave population were to be kept, and the St. Kitts act classified as slaves individuals of African ancestry who failed to offer proof of their freedom to local authorities three days after arrival in the island. By 1820, it was becoming patently manifest to all that the general improvement in the condition of slaves that abolition of the slave trade and slave registration sought to bring about remained a mere chimera. Whether because a high percentage of slaves were outside the childbearing age, or because those of childbearing age were infer¬ tile, or simply because of sexual disproportion, slave births never reached anticipated levels on either island even after 1817. In the meantime, slave deaths continued at a relatively high rate. These two trends apparently counted most in the steady decrease in the overall slave population throughout most of the Rritish Caribbean.16 The continued ill-treatment of slaves by planters induced the Saints to

8

•

FREE COLOREDS OF ST. KITTS AND GRENADA

redouble their attacks on slavery. In the process, officials at the Colo¬ nial Office reluctantly came out in favor of some form of reorganiza¬ tion of the governmental and judicial systems in the colonies. The Commission of Inquiry, which was appointed in 1822 to investigate the state and administration of justice in the region, spent a good deal of time in the various territories between 1823 and 1824 hearing testimony from both whites and free coloreds.17 The commissioners made recommendations in 1825 more in the nature of palliatives than reforms, but their official exposition of the iniquities of the slave system provided a welcome prop to a growing number of individuals who were increasingly convinced that only under imperial coercion would local legislatures ameliorate the lot of slaves and free coloreds. Mounting criticism of planter intransigence prompted the colonial secretary, the earl of Bathurst, to send a strong letter to territorial governors in 1823—even before the commissioners had completed their assignment. Bathurst impressed on the governors his feeling that Parliament would almost certainly legislate for the colonies if the local legislatures did not take positive steps to improve significantly the condition of all Afro-Caribbean peoples. A prime feature of any new legislation must be the removal of obstacles to manumission.18 The stubborn refusal between 1823 and 1830 of legislatures on both Grenada and St. Kitts as well as in a number of other British ter¬ ritories to pass laws that measured up to parliamentary expectation finally induced Viscount Goderich, beginning in 1830 his second term in charge of colonial affairs, to take decisive action. Using as a model an Order-in-Council designed for amelioration on Trinidad—a colony without an elected assembly—Goderich sent to the intransi¬ gent colonies a letter the contents of which he demanded either wholesale acceptance or rejection by local bodies.19 Though legis¬ lators on both islands were furious, the St. Kitts group went further than its Grenada counterpart in denouncing the “theorists on Par¬ liamentary decisions” who required the Assembly’s adoption of the royal edict without discussion. Further, they felt convinced that such odious mandates were emanating from the Colonial Office only be¬ cause “the organ of [their] enemies’ was seated there.20 The reference clearly was to James Stephen the younger, legal adviser to the Colonial Office since 1813, who belonged to a family with a long antislavery tradition. James Stephen the elder had writ¬ ten a masterful pamphlet in 1826 that traced the extent to which colonial legislatures had systematically frustrated Parliament’s efforts from at least 1807 onward to improve the condition of individuals of African descent. The author s conclusion was that direct govern¬ mental action was necessary to induce change.21 By 1832, he had hardened his position somewhat and was cautioning Thomas Pringle,

INTRODUCTION

•

9

secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, against supporting any par¬ liamentary proposal that did not entail general abolition of slavery.22 Because both these views seemed consistent with the position which the younger Stephen often adopted on colonial issues, his critics were in no doubt that he was but an arm of the Anti-Slavery Society. James Stephen the younger, nonetheless, was an able civil servant who combined a sharp legal mind with a sense of moral justice to make acute observations on colonial acts and recommend appropriate ac¬ tion. The return to Parliament in 1832 of candidates favorably disposed to reform in general and the abolition of slavery in particular virtually assured direct parliamentary intervention on behalf of both the slaves and the free coloreds in the colonies. British ministers disregarded the colonies’ objection to Parliament s legislating for them. The offi¬ cial position was that the Declaratory Act, passed by Parliament in 1778 as a concession to the rebellious North Americans, had never denied or abandoned but merely waived Parliament’s right to legis¬ late, and only in the case of internal taxation. Convinced of the con¬ stitutionality and moral imperative of an emancipation act emanating from Britain, Parliament passed the Slavery Abolition Bill on August 20, 1833. Wearied by their endless losses, although comforted some¬ what by the prospect of financial compensation, the legislatures on Grenada and St. Kitts passed enabling legislation with only minor modifications by July 1834.23 On August 1, 1834, the first batch of slaves were to be freed and a general period of apprenticeship was to begin. The local aristocracy’s stubborn refusal to improve the lot of the Afro-Caribbean population and growing antislavery sentiment in Britain facilitated Parliament’s ability to legislate on so many aspects regarding slavery during the early nineteenth century. The West India interest group was no longer able to influence legislation as freely as it did up to at least 1750. Further, the diminishing economic importance of the sugar colonies to overall British economic activity meant that reform-minded politicians would not hesitate to vote as their conscience suggested in favor of amelioration and eventual emancipation. Although at every turn local planters sought to disre¬ gard parliamentary wishes and mandates, their inability to achieve their goals stemmed from changing moral and religious concerns in Britain as well as the weakened economic importance to Britain of the once-vaunted sugar colonies.

2. Demographic Patterns Population data between 1763 and 1833 for Grenada and St. Kitts are both incomplete and irregular and should therefore be treated with a certain amount of caution. In view of Grenada’s recent acquisition by the British and its unsteady internal politics up to about 1800, the British government and local administrators appear to have been greatly concerned with ascertaining the quantity and quality of the island’s population, particularly the members of the free category. Accordingly, up to 1830, officials on Grenada sent frequent reports, “returns,” on the population to the Colonial Office either in response to specific requests or in connection with particular local problems of external defense and internal social control.1 Aware that a sizable proportion of the free population consisted of persons of French extraction—a situation likely to influence greatly the nature of the colony’s social organization—Grenada’s legislators were always sensitive to the need of acquiring and transmitting to the Colonial Office as much census material as they could gather. Thus, for instance, in 1790 and again in 1800 the legislature, in approving some of the many acts passed from time to time to encourage the increase of the colony’s white population, took pains to stipulate the manner in which officials were to ascertain the exact number of whites and slaves on the island. Further, the 1800 act insisted upon annual returns for the entire population and appointed commission¬ ers in each of the island’s seven parishes and the town of St. George’s to compile these returns.2 When these commissioners actually started collecting material, what difficulties they faced and the de¬ gree of accuracy of the returns are all questions for which there are no precise answers because of the unavailability of pertinent informa10

D E M OG R A P H I C PATT E R N S

•

11

tion. The returns that local administrators submitted to the sec¬ retaries of state are extant, however, and from 1810 onward complete runs ol white, free colored, and slave population are available, with the exception of those for whites in 1821 and 1822. Further, the re¬ turns for the years 1812 through 1820 contain parochial and age break¬ downs of the three major population groups; the returns from 1821 on include the sexual composition of the free coloreds and slaves, and those from 1823 on include the sexual composition of whites.3 In general, then, though the pre-1810 population data for Grenada are sparse, those for the post-1810 period are more complete both in terms of the regularity and the quality of material. The census data for St. Kitts are less complete than those for Gre¬ nada. Data for all three major population groups on St. Kitts are available only for the years 1770, 1774, 1788, 1805, 1812, and 1826. Furthermore, only for 1788 and 1812 do the figures yield any informa¬ tion on the parochial distribution of each major group, and even then statistics on the sex and age composition are incomplete.4 This rela¬ tive dearth of material for St. Kitts is likely the result of a common tendency in the older British colonies, which, spared the sort of ethnic and social problems Grenada and other “new” colonies experi¬ enced, paid little attention to gathering detailed or systematic popu¬ lation figures. In fact, it is interesting to note that the only group for which fairly regular figures are available is the slave population. This situation obviously resulted from the necessity to collect taxes or to comply with the Slave Registry Act of 1816.5 Pre-1800 returns for both islands are perhaps less accurate than are the post-1800 returns and probably amount in some cases to little more than educated guesses. Indeed, we know precious little about how the earlier returns were obtained. By 1800, in response to their own needs and Colonial Office requests, Grenada’s legislators did set up machinery for collecting population data, and the commissioners in some periods apparently made a serious effort to collect the re¬ quired data. Particularly emphasized was place of birth, age, time of residence on the island, occupation, place of abode, number and sex of children, and property of both whites and free coloreds. Free persons failing to register their names with the commissioners risked eviction from the island as aliens. For some periods, therefore, the material is fascinatingly detailed and the returns are continuous. Although the post-1800 material is not flawless, it seems to provide a fairly reliable holistic view of the island’s population. The paucity of statistics for St. Kitts does not allow as much latitude as is available for Grenada in evaluating the trustworthiness of popu¬ lation figures. The pre-1800 data were most likely guesswork. The only detailed population census taken was in 1812, after which time,

12

•

FREE COLOREDS OF ST. KITTS AND GRENADA

despite repeated requests from the Colonial Office for updated in¬ formation, officials undertook no similar effort. In fact, in response to a request for data regarding the free colored population in 1825, one local official tersely noted that no census having been taken this return cannot be made out.”6 Accordingly, officials simply estimated the free population after 1812 by using the 1812 census as a base and adding to or subtracting from the grand totals to supply figures reflec¬ tive of their perceptions of population trends. In general, then, because the need for population statistics for St. Kitts did not seem to be as pressing as for Grenada, no specific legislative enactment ensured a continuous compilation of returns. Thanks to the church wardens in the several parishes, we have at our disposal free population figures that, though not fully accurate, at least provide us some yardstick with which to gauge growth and shifts in the free population overtime. Yet if the figure of 1,610 whites on St. Kitts in 1812 is accurate, one should take the 1826 total of 1,860 with a grain of salt if we are to believe a contemporary report that stated, “since the 1812 census it is evident that the population of the Whites is greatly diminished; that of the Free Persons of Color and Blacks much increased, but the Slave Population annually fall off.’ 7 Inaccuracies likewise mar the census data for the slave population of St. Kitts. Local officials themselves admitted that slave returns on St. Kitts prior to compulsory slave registration in 1816 aimed “merely to levy a Poll Tax” and resulted in “several inaccuracies, arising from carelessness or evasions in each census.8 Although the 1816 Slave Registry Act might have plugged such loopholes, problems still pre¬ sented themselves because differing totals appeared as a result of vagaries in the existing returns and the time at which officials re¬ quested the returns. Information that the Colonial Office obtained after the passage of this act, for example, rarely were compiled at the legally stipulated period for registration. Thus from 1816 on, one invariably finds at least two sets of figures appearing for the slave population of St. Kitts in any year, reflecting the different times that each return was compiled. Throughout this chapter for the sake of consistency I have used uniform time periods as much as possible in compiling tables for the slave population. Despite the inaccuracies and sparseness of data, certain broad pat¬ terns emerge that allow us to discuss in general terms the characteris¬ tics of the population on both islands. During the period 1763 to 1833, the population of Grenada and St. Kitts mirrored the general pattern in other British Caribbean plantation societies in which a small number of whites, constituting a declining percentage of the total population, controlled the islands major social, economic, andpoliti-

DEMOGRAPHIC PATTERNS

•

13

cal institutions.9 On St. Kitts the white population during this period decreased in both relative and absolute terms from its pre-1750 level and by 1812 numbered a mere 1,610 persons. This decrease resulted partly from absenteeism among planters who returned to Great Britain and left the control of their estates in the hands of professional attorneys. Partly it resulted from the regular out-migration of whites from St. Kitts and other small territories that had already undergone their sugar revolution to newly acquired British territories that had a relative abundance of virgin land for sugar cultivation.10 Although official estimates in 1826 place the total number of whites then on the island at 1,860, it was probably somewhat less. During the previous fifteen years constant reports were made of the decrease in the number of whites on the islands, a phenomenon probably better reflected by the total of 1,600 reported in 1830.11 Grenada s white population, on the other hand, grew steadily from 1,225 in 1763, to 1,661 in 1771. The initial period of prosperity im¬ mediately after British occupation of the island certainly witnessed a steady influx of white settlers who quickly took up most of the best land available for cultivation. By 1777, however, the white population declined to 1,324, beginning a general trend that continued to the end of the century. This decline probably resulted from the out¬ migration of individuals whose scope for socio-economic advance-

Table 2—1.

Population of St. Kitts,

1756-1831

%

%

Free Colored

Free Colored

Free

Total

Year

White

Colored

Free

of Total Free

1756 1770 1774 1788 1805 1812 1816 1817 1822 1825 1826 1828 1830 1831

2,713 2,746 1,900 1,912 1,800 1,610

—

391 417 908 198 1,996

2,713 3,137 2,317 2,820 1,998 3,606

12.5 18.0 32.2 9.9 55.3

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

1,860

2,500

4,360

57.3

—

—

—

—

1,600 —

3,000 —

4,600 —

65.2 —

of Total Pop.

Slave

Total

21,891 23,000 23,462 20,435 26,000 19,885 18,834 20,168 19,817 19,516 19,525 19,310

24,604 26,137 25,779 23,255 27,998 23,491

—

—

—

19,084

—

—

—

1.5 1.6 3.9 0.7 8.5

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

23,885

10.5

—

—

Sources: C/O 152/50, 152/54, 152/99, 239/2, 239/13, 239/22; PP, XXVI (1789), 646a, pt.iv.

14

•

FREE COLOREDS OF ST. KITTS AND GRENADA

Table 2-2.

Population of Grenada,

Free

Total

Year

White

Colored

Free

1763 1771 1777 1783 1805 1806 1807 1810 1811 1812 1813 1814 1815 1816 1817 1818 1819 1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833

1,225 1,661 1,324 996

1,680 2,076 1,534 2,121

—

455 415 210 1,125 --

—

—

—

—

—

633 771 841 819 823 852 794 824 868 883 883 — —

847 827 832 834 768 782 801 761

813 1,210 1,688 1,676 1,722 1,716 1,575 1,871 2,145 1,797 2,742 3,318 3,344 3,388 3,486 3,497 3,892 3,625 3,743 3,786 4,033

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

—

1,446 1,981 2,529 2,495 2,545 2,568 2,369 2,695 3,013 2,680 3,625 — —

4,235 4,313 4,329 4,726 4,393 4,525 4,587 4,794 4,968 4,604 4,537

1763-1833

%

%

Free Colored

Free Colored

of Total Free

27.1 20.0 13.7 53.0 — — — 56.2 61.1 66.7 67.2 67.7 66.8 66.5 69.4 71.2 67.1 75.6 — — 80.0 80.8 80.8 82.4 82.5 82.7 82.5 84.1 — —

—

Slave

12,000 — — 24,620 32,131 30,841 29,942 30,096 29,381 28,791 28,182 27,679 27,250 27,234 27,698 27,415 27,060 26,910 25,667 25,586 25,310 24,972 24,897 24,442 24,409 24,342 24,135 23,821 23,471 23,164 23,377

Total

13,680 — — 26,741 — — — 31,542 31,362 31,320 30,677 30,224 29,818 29,603 30,393 30,428 29,740 30,535 — — 29,545 29,285 29,226 29,168 28,802 28,867 28,722 28,615 28,439 27,768 27,914

of Total Pop.

3.3 — 4.2 — — — 2.6 3.9 5.4 5.5 5.7 5.8 5.3 6.2 7.0 6.0 9.0 — — 11.5 11.9 12.0 13.3 12.6 13.0 13.2 14.1 — — —

Sources: CO 101/28, 101/42, 101/45, 101/51, 101/61, 101/66, 106/17-27.

ment was obviously diminishing now that the plantation system had become entrenched on the island. The white population further de¬ creased at the end of the century as a result of the civil rebellion that Julien Fedon initiated in 1795. Although reports that 1,000 whites left the island as a result of the rebellion were probably exaggerations, the fall in the white population at this time was sufficiently great to render the 633 whites on the island in 1810 less than one-half of the

DEMOGRAPHIC PATTERNS

•

15

1771 total.12 Despite a slight increase in the numbers up to 1819, the white population never approached its 1777 level during the succeed¬ ing years encompassed in this study. The greater part of both islands’ population consisted of slaves of African descent employed as workers on the plantations and as a general labor force. Grenada’s slave poopulation moved from 12,000 to 24,620 between 1763 and 1783, the period of rapid economic ex¬ pansion, peaked at 32,131 in 1805, and gradually declined thereaf¬ ter. 13 The slave population of St. Kitts, having increased dramatically from 7,321 in 1720 to 19,174 in 1745, peaked at 26,000 in 1805, and then also declined. Despite this steady decline in both islands’ slave population during the nineteenth century, the disproportion in the slave-white ratio was always high. On Grenada, the ratio moved from 9:1 in 1763 to 24:1 in 1783 and finally to 34:1 in 1812 and most of the succeeding years; the ratio on St. Kitts moved from 8:1 in 1770 to 14:1 in 1805, declined to 12:1 in 1812, and to possibly slightly lower ratios thereafter. Yet throughout the period under discussion, the slave population on both islands far surpassed the total of the combined free groups. Lacking the characteristics of the slave and white population, the free colored group was able to increase in both absolute numbers and percentage of the total population during most of the period. Grena¬ da’s free colored population, for example, increased from 455 in 1763 to 1,688 in 1812 and finally to 4,033 in 1830, while that of St. Kitts moved from 391 in 1770 to 908 in 1788, to 1,996 in 1812, and then to 3,000 in 1830. The free colored population of St. Kitts, then, experi¬ enced a tremendous growth between 1770 and 1788, although the pre-1788 figures can be assumed to be deflated. Certainly the 1788 totals are consistent with other available information about the free colored population about that time. In 1782, no fewer than 603 free coloreds were among the 1,077 persons who signed the Articles of Capitulation when the French captured the island.14 Because the signatories were all male and presumably all adults, the total free colored population might well have been about 1,000 and thus in keeping with the 1788 totals. If one discounts the possibility of an extraordinary sudden increase in the free colored population, the number present on the island in the early 1770s must have been larger than the estimates indicate. Free coloreds played a numerically significant role in both islands population. On Grenada, for example, they increased from 27.1 per¬ cent of the free and 3.3 percent of the total population in 1763 to 66.7 percent and 5.4 percent, respectively, in 1812, and finally to 84.1 percent and 14.1 percent, respectively, in 1830, the last year in which census returns differentiated between whites and free coloreds.15 On

16

•

FREE COLOREDS OF ST. KITTS AND GRENADA

St Kitts free coloreds formed 12.5 percent of the free and 1.5 percent of the total population in 1770, 55.3 percent and 8.5 percent, respec¬ tively, in 1812, and only 57.3 percent and 10.5 percent in 1826, per¬ centages somewhat below those for Grenada at the corresponding times. By 1783 on Grenada and by 1812 on St. Kitts, free coloreds no longer formed the smallest population group, an unenviable position that then fell to whites. Officials on both islands were very much aware of the dispropor¬ tion between the free and slave populations, the numerical signifi¬ cance of the free coloreds within the free group, and the critical part they might play in the society by virtue of these numbers. The ab¬ sence of detailed census material for St. Kitts from 1812 on not¬ withstanding, “Common Report and Opinion” placed the island’s 1830 population at 1,600 whites, 3,000 free coloreds and 19,310 slaves, indicating a 1:12 ratio of whites to slaves.16 Grenada unsuccessfully attempted to solve the nagging problem of white depopulation at the end of the eighteenth century by passing various “deficiency” laws that required planters to maintain on their plantations a certain number of whites in proportion to the number of slaves.17 With few exceptions, planters concerned with profit maximization paid lip service to the attempts made by officials to attract white settlers to the island and generally preferred to pay the nominal fines imposed for breaking the law. By 1806, Grenada’s white-slave ratio stood at the alarming rate of 1:60, a much higher ratio than on other British Caribbean islands. At the end of the eighteenth century, for instance, Jamaica, Dominica, and Antigua had ratios of 1:8, 1:12, and 1:15, respectively.18 This decrease in the white population of both islands and the dis¬ proportion between the white and slave populations were part ot a larger problem that plagued other British Caribbean possessions at the same time. By the latter half of the eighteenth century, the possi¬ bility of obtaining white European settlers was at an all-time low. Those available for settlement in the Caribbean preferred to go to the newly acquired territories of Trinidad and Demerara, where they could readily obtain fertile land or higher wages. Grenada s Council president, John Harvey, complained in 1806 of the island s severe deficiency problem and recommended that the legislature increase the fines substantially in the hope of inducing planters to obey the law. He took pride in the fact that he had brought settlers from England to the island after the 1795 rebellion but lamented that it was subsequently impossible for him to obtain any more despite the high price he was willing to pay.19 The absence of a greater number of whites on all the islands posed grave problems of internal security when the militia was away on duty and whites had to leave the planta-

DEMOGRAPHIC PATTERNS

•

17

tion slaves virtually unsupervised and effectively to their own de¬ vices. This absolute shortage of whites on the islands became more ap¬ parent because of the quality of those present. As has been noted earlier, the successful planters who made some profits from sugar cultivation frequently retired to the metropolis and left the operation of their plantations to attorneys. This practice, many scholars have observed, affected adversely the social character of the Caribbean in that it tended to leave the plantations and the islands’ sociopolitical institutions in the hands of “lesser whites.20 Despite the validity of recent claims that such a general charge is in dire need of some modification, contemporaries like W.P. Georges, chief justice of St. Kitts, bemoaned the fact that the settling of “all the landedProprietors in Great Britain had resulted in many of the “most ignorant individuals being placed in managerial positions on the plantations. These men, lacking “accomplishment of good Breeding, or urbanity of Manners, and in the more Liberal Walk of Science and Literature, quickly “affect[ed] Independence” and “aspir[ed] to Importance.” Governor George McCartney of Grenada complained that they expected “great attention to their Complaints, & much personal Civility' to themselves, & if not soothed or gratified are apt to be troublesome at first, & often become dangerous afterwards.”21 Once such individuals had achieved political or socioeconomic stand¬ ing, or both, they promoted class distinctions among the local whites by refusing to mingle socially with those at the lower levels of the socioeconomic spectrum. Ironically, their actions resulted from con¬ cern over the “Weakness of Distance of Banks amongst the Whites and, by attempting to extend the distance, they ultimately impeded the growth of a “Strong White Population. In addition, ethnic factors further divided the white population on Grenada, St. Vincent, To¬ bago, and other territories that Britain had acquired from France after 1763.22 Had the white population been self-perpetuating, the problem of a shortage of whites might not have remained such an acute one. In 1813, Governor Charles Shipley of Grenada clearly recognized this problem when he recommended that local whites promote reproduc¬ tion. But, he lamented, while the islands French whites generally married at a very young age—and presumably reproduced—that was not the case with white men sent from England, “one generation of Whom Succeeds another, and leave no trace behind” except perhaps for their mulatto children.23 What Shipley did not explicitly point out was that the acute shortage of white females on the island from 1770 on, when males constituted roughly 75 percent of the total white population, was partly responsible for the low birth rate among

18

•

FREE COLOREDS OF ST. KITTS AND GRENADA

whites.24 In addition, many whites either died during the civil dis¬ turbances of 1795-96 or left the island as a result of them, and the growth of this group was thus further inhibited. Finally, the induce¬ ments of fertile land in the newly acquired British colonies of Trinidad and Demerara caused an out-migration of whites from both Grenada and St. Kitts. The slave population on both islands also decreased during the early 1800s, particularly when the external sources of replacement dwindled as a result of the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. The premise of abolition had been that masters would sympathetically care for their slaves in the hope of increasing their longevity. It was also thought that if slaves’ morals improved, they would settle in “stable unions” and increase naturally. But whether because a high percentage of slaves were outside the childbearing age or because of other reasons, slave births never reached the anticipated level on either island. It is instructive to note, however, that children under ten years of age formed 36 percent of the slave population on St. Kitts in 1816, and on Grenada for the same period they constituted 20 percent. In the long run they might very well have provided the basis for population growth if masters had adopted effective ameliorative measures. Indeed, Barry Higman argues quite convincingly that the birth rate was already increasing in a number of Caribbean territories by the time of the abolition of slavery.25

Table 2-3. St. Kitts, No. in Registry (1) Total

Slave Population of Grenada and

1817-1831,

Showing Births and Deaths

Decrease by Death

Increase by Birth

M

F

-

-

1,678 1,051 1,044 1,110

1,737 1,022 1,007 1,044

-

-

(2) Total

F

(3) Total

(3) as %

M

— 2,478 1,189 1,133 1,375

— 2,264 1,118 1,043 1,262

— 4,742 2,307 2,176 2,637

— 19 9 9 11

— — — 1,424 1,415 2,839 892 799 1,691 845 758 1,603 786 729 1,515

— 14 9 9 8

(2) as % of(l)

of (I)

Grenada

1817 1822 1825 1828 1831

27,565 25,586 24,897 24,342 23,604

1817 1822 1825 1828 1831

20,168 19,817 19,516 19,310 19,084

— 3,415 2,073 2,051 2,154

— 13 8 8 9

St. Kitts

Source: PP,

1,132 1,187 901 765 858 848 827 801

XXVI (1833), 473.

— 2,319 1,666 1,706 1,628

— 12 9 9 9

DEMOGRAPHIC PATTERNS

•

19

Manumissions and an alarmingly high death rate also adversely affected the slave population. As Table 2-3 indicates, 2,307 (9 per¬ cent), 2,176 (9 percent), and 2,637 (llpercent) slaves died on Grenada during the periods 1822-25, 1825-28, and 1828-31, respectively, and for St. Kitts during the corresponding periods the figures were 1,691 (9 percent), 1,603 (9 percent), and 1,515 (8 percent), respectively. Epidemics were partly responsible for deaths, as on St. Kitts during 1821-24, when measles, whooping cough, and diphtheria took many lives. Still, as one report from Grenada in 1829 noted, that island s increasing death rate during the late 1820s was largely because of “the advanced age of the slaves. 26 Births actually slightly outnumbered deaths on St. Kitts from 1828 on, which, leads to the tantalizing speculation that had the abolition of slavery taken place some ten years later on that island and other British Caribbean possessions, there might very well have been an actual increase in the slave popu¬ lation by about 1840. The spectacular growth of the free colored population on both islands contrasted sharply with the overall decrease of both white and slave. The growth rate was, however, very uneven from year to year, and occasionally the population decreased in absolute numbers. These fluctuations may be indicative of interisland migration by members of this group, the unreliability of census data for the free coloreds from time to time, and the tenuous position that members of this group occupied in society. Yet from 1771 to 1812, Grenada’s free colored population grew more than 300 percent at an annual rate of 3.5 percent, while that of St. Kitts increased by slightly more than 400 hundred percent from 1770 to 1812 at an annual rate of 4 percent. The gain of the free colored population was in a certain sense the loss of the slave population, since for every slave manumitted the total slave population theoretically correspondingly decreased, especially after 1808, when further importation of slaves was prohi¬ bited. On Grenada, for example, an apparent increase of2,055 in free coloreds between 1812 and 1828 included more than 1,200 manumis¬ sions, leaving a real increase from other sources of about 800. During the period 1817-24, owners on St. Kitts manumitted 517 slaves.27 Undoubtedly, some slaves who obtained freedom on Grenada and St. Kitts migrated to other colonies because of familial considerations or with a view toward socioeconomic betterment. Still, there was also an in-migration of free coloreds from some ol the neighboring territories to St. Kitts and Grenada. Indeed, so many were the free coloreds moving to Grenada at the end of the eighteenth century from Mar¬ tinique and other French territories that were then experiencing political unrest that the island legislature occasionally enacted laws either completely prohibiting their entry or mandating very careful

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RELIGION AND EDUCATION

•

127

of 358 students among them, the educational prospect for Grenada’s free coloreds and emerging freedmen on the eve of emancipation seemed somewhat optimistic.30 On St. Kitts, where a public school for whites had operated since the eighteenth century, Anglican parochial schools finally emerged after 1825. By 1830, several parishes boasted schools for free coloreds and slaves. The capital of Basseterre attracted the single largest number of free coloreds, whose enrollment far outstripped that of whites in the all-white school. Fearful of being outmaneuvered by the free coloreds, the governors of the white school cautioned of an im¬ pending situation that could prove “fatally injurious to the best inter¬ ests of the colony’ if the educational system promoted the “raising . . . one class in moral and intellectual strength, while the other would be gradually sinking. This belated concern was not, however, sufficient to halt the trend. By August 1833, when the school for whites reported an enrollment of 84 pupils, six daily parochial schools enrolled 513 students, 152 of whom were slaves and 361 free—mostly free coloreds.31 Three other types of schools—private schools, Sunday schools, and plantation, or estate, schools—existed on the islands and should be mentioned here. Private schools had been present on St. Kitts for some time, but precise enrollment information is lacking. On Gre¬ nada eleven such schools existed in 1829 with a total enrollment of about 300 pupils. Four of these, operated by and for Roman Catholics, provided free education to “poor free and slave girls.’’ The fragile nature of these schools’ existence can be discerned from the fact that in 1830 only seven were operational, with a total enrollment of about 185 free colored and white children.32 Presumably the Roman Catholic schools had closed.

Table 7-9.

Enrollment at Free Public Schools in

Basseterre, St. Kitts,

Year

1825 1826 1827 1828 1829 To July 1830 Total

1825-1830

Schools for

School for

Whites

Free Coloreds and Slaves

45 47 58 64 65 74 353

Source: PP, XLVII (1831-32), 95-103.

—

173 229 221 217 224 1,064

128

•

FREE COLOREDS OF ST. KITTS AND GRENADA

Sunday schools, established by all denominations on both islands during the 1820s, provided religious instruction mostly to slaves though they gladly welcomed free coloreds. Table 7-10 shows the state of these schools in about 1830. As is immediately evident, free coloreds and slaves literally flocked to the Methodist Sunday schools on both islands, but on Grenada there was minimal attendance by slaves at non-Roman Catholic Sunday schools, presumably because of linguistic, ethnic, and organizational factors. The students, many of whom were probably adults, were taught the simple and solemn truths of Christianity” and a very basic amount of reading, mostly by free coloreds. Classes were held either after Sunday worship or on weekdays before or after the completion of the students’ other duties. Plantation, or estate, schools carried the gospel to plantation slaves who, having no nearby church, were unable to attend the Sunday schools. With the permission of plantation managers, Anglicans on both islands and Methodists on Grenada established many such schools; sometimes, as on the Mannings and Anderson estate on St. Kitts, the proprietors hired their own catechist. By 1830, seventeen plantation schools on Grenada accounted for the religious instruction of 429 slaves, and six on St. Kitts instructed 146 slaves. Three years later, the St. Kitts Branch Association, with an obvious sense of pride and satisfaction, pointed out that a total of 1,190 slaves were receiving religious instruction in the island’s forty-three plantation schools. Of the 2,416 persons receiving some kind of formal education in 1833 in schools where the Anglicans were involved, 84 were white children, 382 were free colored children, and the remaining 1,950

Table 7-10.

State of Sunday Schools in

Grenada and St. Kitts, about

1828-1832 St. Kitts

Grenada

Pupils

Pupils

No. of

No. of

Anglicans Roman Catholics Moravians Methodists Total

Total

Schools

68

102 304

9

—

—

—

—

—

—

57 298

598 991

655 1,289

2 1

—

—

—

—

—

1

144

5

S

Total

FC

34

FC

S

Schools

12

156

2 9

562

20

—

850

2,794

Notes: FC = free colored. S = slave. The reports from the Roman Catholics on Grenada and the Anglicans on St. Kitts merely gave the total number of pupils and did not differentiate between free coloreds and slaves. Sources: PP, XLVII (1831-32), 55-59, 95-103; CO 106/22; 239/29.

RELIGION AND EDUCATION

•

129

were slaves.33 Though from a numerical standpoint the Anglicans probably had every reason to be proud of their accomplishments, the critical test ol the contributions made by them and other religious groups rested not simply on the number of their following but on the quality of education they imparted. From an early stage, education of free coloreds and slaves was perceived to be a palliative rather than a mechanism for releasing the majority of workers from their ties to the soil. The imperial powers attempted, through schooling, to train the colonized for roles that suited the colonizer.34 The quality of education provided, then, could not be expected to lead to sweeping socioeconomic changes. Al¬ though the critical role played by the various religious denominations in the establishment and operation of schools would suggest a heavily sectarian curriculum, the colonial situation demanded a certain amount of modification. In the 1820s a broad corpus of opinion supported the teaching of reading and church catechism to all slaves, but gaining in currency was the view that slave drivers should increase their education by learning to write and read and that tradesmen should learn some accounting in addition to reading and writing. These individuals would thus be better trained to function at their particular jobs. Following this line of reasoning up the social hierarchy, the feeling was that all free coloreds should at least receive the maximum amount of education that was available to any slave.35 Therefore, all free coloreds and those slaves who were taught to read and write were exposed to Dr. Andrew Bell’s system of education, later modified by Joseph Lancaster, which allowed the master ample opportunity to supervise the entire school while students learned from peers whom he had already taught.36 In addition to reading, writing, and in some cases arithmetic, the curricula of the girls’ schools on both islands included needlework. Taught with the aim of combining “habits of industry with those of learning,” needlework afforded the girls at Grenada’s central school in St. George’s an opportunity to raise slightly more than £35 be¬ tween 1827 and 1829 from sewing jobs they performed at rates lower than were usual for such work.37 Though this amount might be per¬ ceived as relatively insignificant in pure economic terms, much more important was the incentive for future employment and feeling ol satisfaction it undoubtedly provided to the girls. Reading and writing were essentially extensions of religious in¬ struction in that the Bible and other religious material constituted the standard texts used in all schools. Between December 1825 and May 1826, Grenada’s central schools received from the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge two shipments of mostly religious

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books for their use. By 1827, religious instruction became an area of study in these schools in its own right, so it is safe to assume that the religious content of the curriculum increased in subsequent years. Apart from sewing and arithmetic, then, the formal education that schools on both islands provided for whites, free coloreds, and slaves was religious at base and rudimentary for the most part. Yet the students avidly demonstrated their accomplishment at the annual examination visit made by either the bisohp or members of the local Inspection Committee, which had general responsibilities of over¬ seeing what was being done in the schools. Although free coloreds and slaves undoubtedly benefited from the education they obtained from the schools, these schools were limited and their potential usefulness as agents of societal change was some¬ what circumscribed. While the 242 students who graduated from Grenada’s central schools between 1824 and 1833 were reported in the latter year to be earning an honest livelihood as industrious members of the society rather than otherwise being vagrants and a burthen on the colony, in no way did the schools on either island attempt to equip free coloreds with the skills consonant with their societal and political position, which had been changing since 1823.38 Most white and many free colored parents continued to send their children to Britain for education in the hope that they would thus be better prepared for leadership roles at home. The tragedy, perhaps, is that the government did not actively intervene to promote greater and better educational facilities for the local population. Such inter¬ vention had to await general emancipation, when the British gov¬ ernment felt constrained to appropriate a large sum of money for instituting and improving educational facilities and opportunities in the region as a whole. Nevertheless, the various religious denominations did much pio¬ neering work in education. Laboring with meager resources, the Anglican, Methodist, and Moravian missionaries openly supported the establishment while providing some modicum of Christian doc¬ trine and educational opportunities for free coloreds and slaves. The Roman Catholics on Grenada achieved essentially the same goals though they were the only ones who came anywhere close to chal¬ lenging the sociopolitical framework in an effort to introduce mean¬ ingful change. Admittedly, the religious and educational activities of all major religious groups might have done more to further the antis¬ lavery cause on both islands and generally to induce free coloreds and slaves alike to question the basic assumption on which their societal status rested: missionaries obviously had to keep congregations in¬ formed of the status of the antislavery campaigns in Britain. Yet no religious leader, O’Hannan excepted, openly questioned the status

131 quo; nor do we find free colored and slave church leaders using biblical teachings or their position in the Sunday schools to promote rebellion as did Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, or even Jamaica’s Samuel Sharp. Shango, myalism, voodoo, santeria, rada, and a number of other African religions seem to have been effectively syncretized with or subsumed under the Judeo-Christian tradition and thereafter became virtually nonexistent in either island. Although from a present-day nationalist perspective we may quarrel with the content and direction of the religious and educational activity that the missionaries introduced, they did much to fill the void created by the government’s abnegation of its responsibility.

8. The New World Perspective The position occupied by free coloreds on Grenada and St. Kitts was not markedly different from that of free coloreds in other parts of the British Caribbean and in the New World as a whole. Whether or not laws accommodated free coloreds, as they did on Jamaica, or were openly hostile toward them, as they were on Barbados, the prevailing assumption was that free coloreds, because of their African ancestry, were unworthy to enjoy the status normally accorded to free persons. Sir Alexander Campbell may very well have spoken for the majority of his contemporaries in England when he remarked in 1790 that “in all the islands ... I have known, both English and French, they have considered free Negroes and Mulattoes as a nuisance . . . , and the only advantage the Colonies can receive from them is by employing them in defense of the Island, in case of invasion. 1 It is not difficult to understand why whites should thus categorize a group of individuals into an inferior, even marginal position. Disrimination, after all, had been present from the earliest periods of colonization, and gradually nonwhites, whether slave or free, were ascriptively and juridically assigned an inferior societal status. While some territories regarded all free coloreds as a homogeneous group and treated them similarly, others, like Jamaica, the French Antilles, and colonial Brazil, admitted of various differences based on color gradations within the group.2 Nevertheless, in every New World society free coloreds were viewed first as individuals of African de¬ scent and then as free. Frequently, especially during the period prior to 1800, freedom meant little and color was the all-important yardstick instinctively used by whites in determining the societal status of free coloreds. Only when a special case could be made for

132

THE NEW WORLD PERSPECTIVE

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eminent free coloreds was there any significant deviation from this general rule, a factor that actually confirms the general hypothesis— the exception proved the rule. Leo Elisabeth has pointed out that in the French Antilles, planters transformed the notion that slaves owed respect to their former masters into an insistence that all colored people show respect to whites. Essentially the same point was made concerning colonial Brazil by A.J.R. Russell-Wood, who notes that the stereotyped at¬ titudes of discrimination and prejudice present among local whites were just as severe as the official governmental policy. Eventually, racial inferiority was equated with social inferiority.3 In essence, from a very early period whites in both the French Antilles and colonial Brazil seem to have automatically, almost instinctively, treated free coloreds as being different from themselves. Available evidence raises some doubt about the early emergence of such practice in Barbados. Jerome Handler has pointed out that the first Barbadian law specifically concerning free coloreds did not ap¬ pear before 1721, when free coloreds were legally debarred from voting and giving evidence in the island’s law courts. The passage of this law in 1721 suggests, of course, that considerable social and racial discrimination antedated it,4 but it is still difficult to explain why it took some sixty years after the emergence of a sugar plantation society that was heavily dependent on slave labor for such a law to be enacted. One explanation may be that there were very few free coloreds then on the island. Alternatively, it seems possible that the free coloreds who were present before 1721 were unqualified to be considered as freeholders and thus were unable to vote or give evidence. In any event, by the end of the eighteenth century all mature slave plantation societies had not only passed laws regulating the behavior of slaves but also specifically curtailing the activities of free coloreds. On Barbados, legislators subsequently built on the 1721 law and “by 1740 a handful of provisions in the island’s legal code particularly referred to freedmen. On Jamaica, as early as 1711 a law had been passed “forbidding Jews, Blacks, Mulattoes, or Indians from officiat¬ ing in any public office in the island. Whites who employed any of these persons to perform such tasks were fined £100. ”5 Slowly, al¬ most imperceptibly, each island passed laws lending judicial sanction to practices that were already present. Presumably the relatively small number of free coloreds on each island during the early years of its settlement had made it possible for whites to keep the free col¬ oreds in place. The situation changed during the latter half of the eighteenth cen¬ tury. This period coincided with the emergence in most Caribbean territories of a sizable free colored population that used available

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resources to advance economically. Because most of the practices by which they had customarily suppressed the activities of free coloreds lacked a legal basis, island whites moved swiftly to rectify the situa¬ tion and further control the economic activities and sociopolitical aspirations of the free colored group. In the Virgin Islands, an act of 1783 restricted the amount of land that free coloreds could purchase to no more than eight acres and at the same time prevented them from being regarded as freeholders. The act also prohibited them from owning or inheriting more than fifteen slaves at one time and subjected them to whipping if they were to strike whites.6 This act was passed only ten years after the islands received a representative government and clearly is of much importance in our attempt to discern the gradual juridical erosion of the rights of free coloreds. In order to preserve the slave system, whites obviously felt it was neces¬ sary to regulate all people of color. Other aspects of the Virgin Islands act as far as they relate to free coloreds deserve further attention. Free coloreds were required to choose a white freeholder who would be answerable for the Tenor of his, her, or their Conduct and Lives, and direct the Conversations and Employments of said Free Person or Persons according to the Laws of these Islands. ”7 Free coloreds were expressly prohibited from holding, renting, or even employing more than fifteen slaves on pain of paying a tax equal to thirty shillings per annum for each slave above the limit in addition to the regular annual poll tax levied on all slaveholders. To ensure that accurate and regular accounting was kept, the law required free colored slaveholders to report annually to a justice of the peace on the number of slaves they held.7 This legisla¬ tion was more restrictive of free coloreds’ economic activities than any similar law passed on Barbados, Grenada, Jamaica, or indeed any other of the Leeward Islands up to the end of the eighteenth century. As Elsa Goveia has remarked on the Virgin Islands act, “the tendency . . . was to preserve inequalities, as well as the sanction of force, in order to preserve the slave system, which was itself a system of inequality. The free colored as well as the slaves were to be confined within limited economic boundaries. This again was part of the logic of the slave system.”8 The Jamaican legislature demonstrated in 1762 that it could not be blind or inactive to efforts, however well intentioned or innocent, that whites were making to promote economic equality for the races. Apparently legislators and a significant number of local whites had become convinced that white fathers were leaving sizable estates to their free colored children, the cumulative effect of which was the gradual emergence of a fairly wealthy free colored group. A legisla¬ tive inquiry reported in 1762 that such inheritances of real estate and slaves ranged between £200,000 and £300,000 and included four

THENEWWORLDPERSPECTIVE

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sugar estates, seven cattle pens, thirteen houses, and other un¬ specified lands. Widi such startling evidence, the legislators passed the Inheritance Act of 1762, which placed a £2,000 limit on the amount of property that a free colored person could inherit from a white. Any will that exceeded the £2,000 legacy to a free colored was to be null and void.9 At work on both Jamaica and the Virgin Islands was more than economic self-interest lor the whites. At issue was a desire to maintain intact a sociopolitical system that accorded to whites pride of place in all the slave plantation societies while relegating to individuals of African descent—slave or free—a subordinate status. This phenome¬ non was not entirely new. As early as 1702 the Antigua legislature had put into law principles very similar though not at all as repressive as those later adopted by the Virgin Islands.10 Everywhere it was well understood that West Indian society was erected on the principles of inequality and insubordination, with race being the main determi¬ nant of status. . . . The whites . . . viewed both subordinate castes with supercilious contempt. Accordingly, as John Reeves, law clerk to the Board of Trade, noted of the entire set of West Indian slave laws in his report to the Select Committee of Parliament investigating the slave trade, the free coloreds were everywhere regarded as “a De¬ scription of People, that seem to have been judged not very well qualified to govern themselves in a State of Freedom.’11 Neither Grenada nor St. Kitts was innocent of his charge. And yet even during the eighteenth century, free coloreds either as a group or individually were sometimes exempted from some of the harsher aspects of these otherwise restrictive laws. Jamaica led the way throughout the British Caribbean with the passage of a law in 1733 that regarded as legally white individuals who were three de¬ grees removed from African ancestry. The law also stipulated that in order to enjoy the privileges of whites these individuals had to be baptized into Christianity.12 In colonial Spanish America, ambitious free persons of color were able to ascend the social ladder as a result of the Crown’s willingness to sell certificates of legal whiteness, called cedillas de gracias al sacar. This practice in colonial Spanish America was engaged in because of both financial considerations and the gov¬ ernment’s desire to allay discontent among prominent persons of color.13 In colonial Brazil the appointment of free mulattoes to high government office with the concurrence of local authorities invari¬ ably served to ensure that they would be considered as white. Ac¬ cording to A.J.R. Russell-Wood, Joao Mauricio Rugendas, an artist who visited Brazil in the early nineteenth century, “asked a mulatto if the local ‘capitao-mor’ [captain-major] was a mulatto and received in reply, ‘He was, but is not any more.’ 14 The lead that Jamaica took in making legally white individuals who

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were certain degrees removed from their African ancestry was not duplicated elsewhere in the British Caribbean during the eighteenth century. The closest that any other island came during this time to allowing some free coloreds as a group to enjoy privileges equal to those of whites—almost making them legally white—was in a rather specific case that occurred on Grenada in 1790. Previous population acts had imposed a fine on any plantation owner who did not employ on his plantation a certain number of whites in proportion to the number of slaves he owned. In this way legislators on Grenada, as throughout the British Caribbean, hoped to attract white settlers, particularly to the plantations, so as to facilitate effective slave con¬ trol. These laws bore heavily against free colored plantation owners, who were finding it extremely difficult if not altogether impossible to hire whites to work for them. Not only was the decline in the number of whites on the island militating against them, but the racial postu¬ lates of Caribbean society in general meant that whites would have considered it beneath their dignity to work on a plantation owned by a free colored. In December 1790, the Grenada legislature exempted from paying the general deficiency tax free colored planters whose male children resided with them on the plantation. Only in this case was a free colored person treated similarly to a white.15 That Jamaica chose to make free mulattoes legally white, under certain circumstances, bespeaks the importance of racial consid¬ erations not only in that territory but throughout New World planta¬ tion societies. The premium placed on racial factors varied from territory to territory, as indeed it did in different parts of a particular territory, but everywhere lightness of complexion was a useful vehi¬ cle for socioeconomic advancement for the free coloreds, though to be sure not the only one. In Surinam, for example, authorities always maintained a strict distinction between free blacks and free coloreds and actually organized both categories into separate military com¬ panies. In colonial Brazil, as in Jamaica and Spanish America, a wide range of terms was used to describe the degree of whiteness or black¬ ness of individuals within the general free colored community.16 Al¬ though such a range of terms is not evident in territories like Gre¬ nada, St. Kitts, and Barbados, one recent writer was forced to admit of Barbados that phenotypic diff erences “may have had more social relevance than is indicated by the available sources. 17 Those territories that used a broad range of terms to describe phenotypic groupings within the free colored community were the ones that tended more than others to sanction sociolegal differences among the phenotypes. Thus, Surinam and Curasao, for example, could match the experience of Jamaica in singling out mulattoes for special sociolegal treatment. In such territories, whites demon-

THE NEW WORLD PERSPECTIVE

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strated their belief in their own superiority and obviously reasoned that the further removed a person was from being white, the less was the individual s worth to society. In those territories that lacked specific sociolegal positions for individuals based on their phenotype, the situation was really more a matter of the degree of these distinc¬ tions rather than the lack of distinctions per se. The prevalence of coloreds within the free colored community, the frequency with which colored slaves gained manumission in comparison with their black counterparts, and the contemporary use of terms like mulatto, cabre, mustee and “Negro when describing indi¬ viduals or groups within the free colored community suggest that contemporaries placed some social value on these distinctions. If phenotype was important within the free colored communities of the New World, equally important, perhaps, was that distinction based on the length of time that a person had enjoyed freedom and whether or not a person was born free. The evidence for these factors is much more conclusive throughout the region than is that for phenotypic distinctions, though the latter were not necessarily any less important. During the final years of slavery on St. Kitts and Grenada, a law was passed extending to free coloreds who had been born free certain benefits enjoyed by whites. In Surinam, likewise, authorities made legal distinctions between those free persons who were born free and those who were set free. The latter had certain obligations to their former masters; they were expected to treat them with respect and to help support them if they became povertystricken.18 While data from the British Caribbean are not as specific as that from the Netherlands Antilles, there is no doubt that through¬ out the New World whites felt that the length of time that individual free coloreds had been free was an important ingredient in determin¬ ing how fit they were to enjoy some of the fruits of free status. In a sense, what was most important to whites was probably not simply the accumulated years of freedom but rather how free persons of color used those years—the extent to which free coloreds had internalized whites’ values and presumably turned their backs on African traditions and cultures. An indispensable part of this sociali¬ zation process was education, which probably helps explain why socially aspiring free coloreds went to such lengths to acquire a Euro¬ pean education. Frequently, mulattoes whose white fathers were of ample financial means journeyed to the metropole to gain an educa¬ tion. Edward Long points out that during the eighteenth century, white fathers from Jamaica would send their free colored sons to “Westminster, or Eaton, to be instructed in the elements of learning, amongst students of the first ranks that wealth and family can give,’ while the daughters went to “Chelsea or some other famed seminary;

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where she learns music, dancing, French, and the whole circle of female bon ton.”19 In this regard, Jamaica may very well have out¬ stripped the other British Caribbean islands during the late eighteenth century in terms of the number of free coloreds who obtained such lavish education. The majority of the free colored chil¬ dren were educated locally either by private tutors, religious organi¬ zations, or the public schools that local governments hesitantly pro¬ vided. The official attitude toward education for free coloreds varied throughout the New World. In the French Antilles, for example, it was considered dangerous for free coloreds to obtain an education. As early as 1765 authorities outlawed the employment of free coloreds in notaries’ offices. In 1802, Villaret-Joyeuse attempted to close com¬ pletely all the schools of the colored people of Martinique because he believed that education was likely to sow the seeds of revolution. At the other end of the spectrum was Surinam, which established a public school for free colored children as early as 1760.20 Most of the other territories fell in between. Barbados and St. Kitts prevented free coloreds from attending public schools set up for whites while turning a blind eye to whatever educational facilities were estab¬ lished by religious bodies. Other territories simply remained silent on educational matters for non whites and provided little direct or indirect support throughout the period of slavery. Everywhere, though, free coloreds regarded education as a mechanism for socioeconomic advancement. Free coloreds, therefore, perceived that there were certain differ¬ ences among them, because of color, education, or free status at birth. Mindful of these differences, whites exploited them to the fullest and effectively used a “divide and rule approach in dealing with the entire group. Ultimately, they succeeded in keeping free coloreds as a whole in a subordinate position within the slave com¬ munity. The elite of the free colored community in some territories made little common cause with the other free coloreds or even the slaves and never ceased attempting to impress on whites how superior they were to other free coloreds. This phenomenon gave rise to what one writer has referred to as the “mulatto problem ’ in nineteenth-century Jamaica. There the free colored elite turned their backs on the others and attempted to gravitate toward whites, who never considered them as equals. The result of this continued rejec¬ tion by whites, she argues, was that the largely lightskinned free colored elite developed a feeling of self-hatred or diminished self¬ esteem.21 Naturally, most whites saw little wrong with the critically inferior position to which they relegated the free coloreds. Throughout the

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New World whites carelessly stated that free coloreds were lazy and disliked hard work, particularly on the plantations, and for these reasons they could not advance as one would naturally expect. Even an otherwise reliable and perceptive critic, Sir Alexander Campbell, could not adequately mask his prejudices when he remarked in 1790 that on all the islands he had visited, many freedmen who had for¬ merly yearned for freedom later repented “of their being made free, as they found it difficult to maintain themselves so well as they were maintained before.” Sir Alexander, it will be recalled, was a large slaveholder who had a vested interest in maintaining slavery. He therefore tried to paint as idyllic a picture as possible of the condition of slaves. Having bemoaned the fact that free colored tradesmen “followed their occupation till they could purchase a Negro, and then left off working themselves, he remarked that “some of them lived upon the idle gains of Negro Wenches—I never knew a free Negro, in any of the islands, work in the field at daily labour, nor do I believe such Negro would hire himself to work in the field for any wages— Their general idea of liberty seems to be not to be obliged to work.”22 According to his reasoning, slothfulness was rampant among the free coloreds. Similar remarks were made regarding free coloreds elsewhere. On Martinique, authorities reported that the free colored town worker “works little, two or three days a week; his pay is enough for him for the rest of the week.” In colonial Brazil, the newly manumitted slave was regarded as “punch-drunk on his liberty, rejecting all authority, working only in order to be able to buy food and drink, and ending as a beggar in jail.” The free mulattoes reportedly “rejected offers of employment and preferred to live a life of moral torpor, drunkenness, and pauperdom.”23 Throughout the British Caribbean, contempo¬ rary whites echoed such views. It seems, however, that at one level these constant complaints of free colored antipathy to work were really reflective of either whites’ inability to attract free colored labor to the plantations or else simply a lack of desire on the part of these free coloreds to engage in plantation labor. At another level, the complaints may very well mirror the misguided perceptions of indi¬ viduals who were opposed to manumissions and the growth of the free colored population. As Leo Elisabeth has astutely remarked of the French Antilles, “the apparently gradual appearance of the white ascription of idleness and sloth to the free colored community . . . arose in the face of the fact that the newly freed had very often used their wages to purchase their freedom.’ 24 Associated closely with such contemporary accounts of slothfulness among the free coloreds was the view that a large number of the newly manumitted actually preferred slavery to freedom, assertions that

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implied a rather benign form of slavery in the territories concerned. Two cases will illustrate this point. Sir Ashton Warner Byam, who served as solicitor general of Grenada from 1774 to 1779 and attorney general from 1783 to 1788, reported in 1788 to the Select Committee of Parliament investigating the slave trade of a case he had heard “from good testimony involving a slave who had lost a foot from an accident. As a humanitarian gesture, his master subsequently put him on board a ship bound for the coast of Africa and instructed the captain “to leave him there at liberty.” Although the slave was “car¬ ried to the same part of the Coast from which he had been brought, and found many of his relations,” when the captain proposed leaving him there in accordance with the master s directions, the Slave posi¬ tively refused, and returned of his own choice with the Captain to Grenada, and continued afterwards as a slave to his master. 25 The second case involved a Barbadian freedwoman who had asked to be reenslaved. The woman, forty-five-year-old Betty Occo, had not only purchased her freedom some eighteen months earlier but had also “assisted in purchasing the freedom of a man she was living with on another Estate.” However, noted Bishop William Hart Col¬ eridge in an 1831 letter to his superiors in London, “the man has . . . cast her off, and the poor thing is come back to the Codrington Estate because she “had no place to put her head in, or any friend to take her in. Eventually Betty Occo was welcomed back at Codrington, given a bit of land on which to build a house, and apparently remained there in servitude for some time thereafter.26 The above cases clearly were exceptional and most free coloreds throughout the region maintained their free status whenever it was achieved. In whatever manner they made a living—as barbers, tailors, hucksters, tavern keepers, carpenters, or in the wide range of intermediary economic activities between those traditionally re¬ served for whites and slaves—free coloreds were determined to maintain their freedom. The critical difference was that as free per¬ sons they were now in a position to determine for themselves where and when they should work. Planters were obviously unable to accept this new reality. Those whites who perpetually complained of free colored poverty, slothfulness, and roguish habits apparently were blind to similar characteristics among their own group. One of their contemporaries, Sir Alexander Campbell, reported that the only is¬ land on which he had seen beggars or individuals who were the object of misery was Barbados. There, he noted, he “saw a great many White beggars and miserable objects—some of them serving Free Negroes and Slaves, who pay a certain weekly allowance to their master for their time.”27 Obviously poverty knew no racial boundaries. The mating and marriage patterns between free coloreds and the

THE NEW WORLD PEHSPECT1VE

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other major population groups, showed much similarity everywhere despite the vagaries of official postures. Usually, white males mated with free colored women, preferably the lightskinned ones. Yet, powerful social mores deterred the prevalence of mixed marriages in the British territories. In those instances that have come to light, such as those in Grenada about 1830 (discussed in the following chap¬ ter), the great efforts that were taken to conceal the marriages clearly point to an unwillingness to admit that a well-known instance of concubinage had progressed to marriage. In the French Antilles, by contrast, as early as 1703 authorities felt compelled to impose penal¬ ties on white men who married free colored women. By 1711 in Guadeloupe demands were being made for an official ban on these marriages. Between 1741 and 1768, authorities in French Guiana labored with the problem and finally decided to use a 1741 opinion discouraging interracial unions to discriminate against the children of such liaisons.28 In Surinam, local officials referred to the Board of the Society of Surinam in Holland one of the more famous requests made (in 1781) for a marriage between a white man and a free black woman, which suggests that even if an actual law was absent, social forces operating as law obviously prohibited such a relationship. As it turns out, however, the request was granted. The great wealth of the woman clearly was taken into consideration.29 One result of this attitude—whether legal or social—toward inter¬ racial marraiges was the high incidence of concubinage and illegiti¬ mate births in each territory. The contemporary white writers are almost silent on these aspects, and when they do make mention of them it is invariably in a negative context. But the prevalence of free mulattoes everywhere was permanent testimony of these sexual con¬ tacts. The insistence of officials in some territories that prospective officeholders demonstrate their “purity of blood” indicates at yet another level the existence of a substantial number of individuals from these mixed unions. Despite the fact that children of slave mothers would follow their mother into slavery, free colored males throughout the New World demonstrated by their actions that at times the bonds of affection between themselves and slaves were strong indeed. Asked by the Select Committee of Parliament if he had known of instances of free coloreds marrying women slaves although they knew that the off¬ spring of that marriage would be subject to slavery, James Tobin, who had traveled extensively and resided for some time in the Leeward Islands, replied: “According to the sense in which the word is under¬ stood among Negroes, I have—it is indeed a very common case. Equally emphatic was James Baillie, who resided in the region be¬ tween 1755 and 1771, chiefly at St. Kitts and Grenada, where he acted

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as plantation attorney and owner of Hermitage estate on the latter island. Baillie testified that he recollected several instances of such marriages, though he added that the slaves were “frequently field Negroes.”30 Other British territories probably had similar marriages between free coloreds and slaves, and certainly placed no legal re¬ strictions on them. Yet it was clearly understood that the masters approval must first be obtained before a slave married anyone, in¬ cluding another slave. Free coloreds in the French Antilles, on the other hand, were explicitly forbidden to marry slaves. The fact that such a prohibition was deemed necessary in the late eighteenth century probably points to an increasing frequency of such marriages as the century wore on. Apparently some articles of the Code Noir conflicted with each other and left in doubt the right of slaves to marry free persons, the claim to freedom of the slave woman who thus married, and the legal status of the offspring of such unions. To plug the loophole, the administration in 1775 obtained a clarification that effectively prohibited marriages between free coloreds and slaves. Positive local legal sanction for this interpretation was granted on Martinique in a 1789 ordinance that prohibited marriages between free coloreds and slaves on the island. By 1805, a more comprehensive restriction was approved when the Civil Code forbade all people of different classes from intermarry¬ ing.31 However well intentioned these laws may have been as mechanisms for arresting the growth of the free colored population, their emergence in the French Antilles is rather ironic in that these territories were everywhere perceived to be infested with radical Republican egalitarian ideology at the end of the eighteenth century. Despite all the obvious signs of division between the free colored communities of different territories or nationalities, by the end of the eighteenth century certain important developments ensured at least a surface unity if not a certain amount of group solidarity among free coloreds everywhere. The growth of radical evangelism throughout Europe produced a new breed of individuals who were questioning the institution of slavery throughout the world. The resulting growth of the antislavery movement in the Western hemisphere obviously aided in focusing attention on the position of free coloreds and slaves in the New World. An important offshoot of this was that the free coloreds not only found friends and champions of their rights within the ranks of the various antislavery societies; they also partook in some of the deliberations.32 Gradually, they came to see the com¬ monality of their position vis-a-vis that of the whites and started unifying to attack the system. The mounting debates in Europe, particularly in Britain, on the abolition of the slave trade was avidly followed by slaves and free

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coloreds in the region. Newspapers, conversations overheard by domestic slaves and free coloreds in towns and cities, and informa¬ tion gathered from religious leaders all promoted an informed community ol slaves and free coloreds. They knew that all was not well, that individuals in Europe were interested in making changes within the slave system. Further, the inability of the British and U.S. planters to prevent the halting of the Atlantic slave trade provided to free coloreds and antislavery supporters alike added reason to believe that the planters were not as all-powerful as previously had been imagined. The old order was changing and giving place to the new. The single most important event at this time that both fostered group unity among the free coloreds and aided them in promoting their rights everywhere was the coming of the French Revolution. This unleashed throughout France’s overseas empire powerful egalitarian forces that quickly seemed to be getting out of control. On St. Domingue, the failure or hesitancy of local whites to redress the grievances of free coloreds, who had been granted equality with whites by the French National Assembly, opened the floodgates to extremely cruel and acrimonious fighting. Free coloreds, whites, and slaves were all participants at various stages of the fighting, though for different reasons. Each understood “Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality’’ differently. The slaves’ eventual winning of the war re¬ sulted in the establishment in 1804 of the black republic of Haiti.33 Throughout the struggle, free coloreds and slaves had demonstrated that liberty and equality were as meaningful to them as to the whites. Similar rumblings were present on Martinique though on a less violent scale than on St. Domingue. The new government in France sent commissioners, under the leadership of Victor Hugues, to the region to implement the liberal provisions of the National Assembly as they applied to slave emancipation and free coloreds’ rights. Be¬ cause planters were hesitant to extend these provisions willingly, fighting also broke out on Martinique. As early as 1791 both free coloreds and slaves had taken up arms against whites. The commis¬ sioners guaranteed to both groups their new rights and sought for both philosophical and political reasons to spread their ideology into other territories. Hardly any slave society in the New World was immune from the spillover effects of the French and Haitian revolutions. On Jamaica, St. Vincent, and Surinam, the outbreak of maroon wars almost simul¬ taneously so demanded the urgent attention of both local and impe¬ rial authorities that their resources were at times stretched to the limit. It did not take the most sophisticated analysis to conclude that there was a causal effect between these outbreaks and what was tak¬ ing place in the French territories. Not only were free coloreds and

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slaves challenging long-established social divisions, but it was in¬ creasingly obvious that the French were sowing the seeds of dissen¬ sion. Fedon’s rebellion on Grenada in 1795 was but a part of this overall movement.34 The Caribbean world in the 1 /90s seemed to be a rather troubled one. By their actions, whites demonstrated that they were fully cogniz¬ ant of the presence of group awareness among free coloreds, regard¬ less of their national affiliation. In the United States, many slave states passed laws prohibiting the importation or immigration of slaves or free coloreds from the French territories. South Carolina, for example, used its Seamen’s Acts to ensure that individuals of African ancestry who arrived as sailors on ships would be constantly kept on board or held in detention on land until the ship was ready to sail.35 It was deemed unwise or unsafe to allow such free coloreds and slaves to have intercourse with those within the state for fear that the minds of the latter would be influenced by the misguided sentiments of freedom and equality that were rampant everywhere in the French islands. Within the British Caribbean, the pattern was similar and authorities sought to isolate their community from outside influ¬ ences. Despite the attempts of whites to prohibit such intercourse, free coloreds were exchanging ideas and strategies for improving their position. On St. Kitts the discovery and subsequent confessions of free coloreds clearly identified with the Societe des Amis des Noirs in F ranee created panic among whites because of the larger implications of such free colored activity. In May 1795, John Stanley, the president of the Council reported that among five free coloreds who had at¬ tempted to land on the island was Jean Frangois de Cotte. De Cotte had previously “commanded a company of Coloured People at Guadeloupe, was “a member of their Society of the Amis de la Liberte,” and had intended “to stir up sedition among the free coloredpeople. . . to follow the example of those in the French islands. From the “examination” of de Cotte, it appears that this landing, at least the fourth of free coloreds from Guadeloupe, had as its intention “to attack St. Kitts and put to death all white inhabitants, women and children.”36 Another case involves Morillon Desfosses, a Frenchman from Guadeloupe who was seized at Antigua as a spy in 1793. From evi¬ dence obtained by Antiguan authorities, it appears that Desfosses had been “dispatched by the Committee of Safety at Guadeloupe to the different English Islands, for the purpose of watching the Motions of the loyal French Emigrants there, and of exciting an Insurrection of the free Gens de Coleur and Slaves.’37 Desfosses himself admitted that he hoped to "persuade the free people of colour to enter into

THE NEW WORLD PERSPECTIVE

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correspondence with the French Government in order that it might teach them the political rights which they ought to enjoy, that it might point out to them the mode of organization adapted to show the negroes the means by which they might obtain their liberty.”38 For the free coloreds and slaves, exposure to such contacts and influences as Desfosses and de Cotte presented them with the seemingly real prospect of extending their rights and abolishing slavery. In 1793, for example, the free coloreds of Martinique publicly accused colonial counterrevolutionaries of suppressing rights of free coloreds and denying freedom to slaves. In furtherance of this position, they circulated a declaration throughout the Caribbean calling on their brethren to support the Revolution as the surest way of improving their societal position.39 This is partly why officials attempted in vain to isolate their own free colored and slave populations from the ideas and activities of their French counterparts. The internationalization of the free colored position and demands during the “Age of Revolu¬ tion was an important aspect of the growth of class solidarity both within each territory as well as among territories. This new solidarity became evident in all the British territories in the early nineteenth century when free coloreds began petitioning as a group to both the local legislators and ultimately the British Parlia¬ ment for the removal of their disabilities. The mounting criticism that was being directed toward West Indian slavery and the society in general placed the planters on the defensive. Although they may have wished otherwise, supporters of the plantation system simply were unable to avoid making important changes geared toward reordering colonial society. In 1813, Jamaica passed two important acts: one allowed free coloreds to serve as deficiencies on plantations, while the other permitted them to testify in all cases and repealed previous acts that had prevented them from inheriting property. A Bahamas act of 1822 made free coloreds competent witnesses in cases against whites. In the Virgin Islands, an act of 1818 repealed the restrictive elements of the 1783 act discussed earlier and made them eligible to vote for whites. When these acts are taken in conjunction with similar acts passed on St. Kitts, Grenada, and Barbados, the pattern be¬ comes unmistakably clear.40 Finally, colonial legislatures were re¬ moving oppressive bits of legislation that they themselves had earlier approved, and by 1833 free coloreds throughout the British Carib¬ bean occupied a juridical position equal to that of whites. The relatively smooth and quick expansion of the civil rights of free coloreds in these territories was not matched anywhere else in the New World. In the United States, where planters continued to hold sway in the legislative bodies of the slaveholding states in particular, the thirty-year period prior to the Civil War was marked by an in-

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FREE COLOREDS OF ST. KITTS AND GRENADA

creasing attack on the status of the free coloreds. In the two-caste slave system, planters clearly felt that they could not accommodate the free coloreds without weakening significantly their defense ot slavery. In Surinam, Curasao, Cuba, and Brazil, the continued pres¬ ence of slavery and a less effective abolitionist movement impeded any meaningful progress free coloreds as a group may have hoped to make To be sure, individuals did make significant socioeconomic progress, but as a group free coloreds still faced legal discrimination. In the French Antilles, the period after July 1830 witnessed the beginning of a liberal era during which the free coloreds obtained an expansion of their political rights. Like their brethren in the British Caribbean, and in the United States after the Civil War, they too soon discovered that the removal of their legal disabilities did not necessar¬ ily grant them equality with whites. ' The free coloreds in the New World, then, did not as a rule opt for drastic social change. They pressed their claim for an improvement in their sociolegal position, but they remained largely blind to the plight and cause of slaves, probably because a number of the elite were slaveholders who had already been socialized into the ways of the superordinate group. Thus, social change came only hesitantly in the Caribbean. Whereas, for example, in Cuba and parts of Latin America the whites sought independence from the metropolitan powers and the slaves sought their freedom, in other parts of the Caribbean the free coloreds merely wanted a guaranteed role in soci¬ ety. Only on St. Domingue was there a difference when free coloreds and slaves overthrew the society by force.

9 Assessment and Evaluation Franklin Knight concluded his study of nineteenth-century Cuban slave society' by suggesting that comparative analyses of New World slavery should be concerned less with concurrent time spans and the metropolitan institutional differences than with equivalent stages of economic and social growth. While not dismissing the need for such emphasis on similarity in the stage of socioeconomic development, Barry Higman still sees virtue in examining the socioeconomic de¬ velopment of territories over a concurrent time span but within a constant metropolitan framework.1 The present study, essentially combining both approaches, supports both authors’ contention that the stage of territories’ economic growth should be a major considera¬ tion in future comparative studies. That Grenada’s sugar revolution occurred some fifty years after that of St. Kitts accounts for the appar¬ ently more open slave society in the former territory during the third quarter of the eighteenth century. A greater degree of congruence was evident between both territories by the early 1800s with regard to the treatment meted out to slaves and free coloreds by white planters. Because the predominant assumption underlying the existence of slavery in the New World during the eighteenth and nineteenth cen¬ turies was that individuals of African descent were innately inferior, whites could not help but translate such racial prejudices into actual subordination of slaves and free coloreds. The dictates of plantation society would not have it otherwise. As Edward Brathwaite has as¬ serted, there was at work in every plantation society a “cultural action based upon the stimulus/response of individuals within the society to their environment and ... to each other. 2 Although Brathwaite is

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FREE COLOREDS OF ST. KITTS AND GRENADA

unsure as to whether some law operates when individuals or groups come together in a society, he is convinced that an obscure force was at work in Jamaican slave society to alter individuals’ behavior so as to produce some compliance with generally accepted norms and modes of behavior. Obviously supportive of the overall creolization process, this 'force induced local whites on both Grenada and St. Kitts to adjust previously accepted standards to meet the exigencies of a changing society. Despite the general isomorphic characteristics of all slave societies, the experiences of free coloreds in the two territories under discus¬ sion differed the one from the other as well as from other British Caribbean territories. Arnold Sio s call for a separation of the practice and sanctioning of miscegenation from the acceptability of the prog¬ eny of these unions is particularly germane to the discussion at hand.3 According to Sio, specific military and political conditions and the severe shortage of whites on Jamaica rather than the simple fact of prevalence of miscegenation explain the special exemptions ac¬ corded to mulattoes on that island. Such exemptions in turn led to a general improvement in the overall position of free coloreds in that territory relative to what obtained on Barbados, which lacked slave rebellions and maroon threats and had a much lower slave-white population ratio than Jamaica. As in both these territories, miscege¬ nation was prevalent on Grenada and St. Kitts. Yet Grenada resem¬ bled Jamaica somewhat in that it always had a high slave-white ratio, lacked a vibrant resident white population, and local whites lived with the constant fear of servile and free colored insurrection. As on Jamaica, Grenadian whites relied heavily on free coloreds to protect them against maroon activity and possible slave insurrections and in tracking down runaways during the early years of the society. Despite constant remarks that free coloreds were untrustworthy, the group was important for purposes of social control and by 1813 consti¬ tuted one-third of the island’s militia.4 This reliance of whites on free coloreds, according to Sio’s reckoning, would have led to greater acceptance of the group in society as a whole and ultimately facili¬ tated cordial race relations. This is borne out on Grenada up to 1766 at least. Thereafter, maroon threats subsided somewhat, and several laws were passed that made no distinction between free coloreds and whites.5 On St. Kitts, by contrast, the marginal need of even a militia from the late eighteenth century onward and the presence of more white men of arms-bearing age than on Grenada minimized the im¬ portance of free coloreds for paramilitary purpose. Island whites, like those of Barbados could more effectively satisfy their defense needs because of the absence of maroon slave activity. In this situation, the free coloreds’ overall societal position was likely to be worse.

ASSESSMENT AND EVALUATION

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Yet a certain amount of caution is necessary when making compari¬ sons between Jamaica and Grenada. While Winthrop Jordan has pointed to the uniqueness of Jamaica in the “practice of publicly transforming Negroes into white men’ through the passage of special laws exempting some free mulattoes from the force of laws to which their African ancestry subjected them, he and a number of other scholars have rightly linked this practice of special bill legislation to military reliance of whites on free coloreds.6 Despite the obvious defense capabilities of Grenada’s free coloreds, no such private acts were passed on this island. In fact, the legislature rejected the only request made by the whites’ favorite free mulatto, Louis La Grenade, Sr. Louis La Grenade, it will be recalled, owned more than fifty acres of land by 1772. Citing his civic record and his military achievement of successfully commanding a corps of free coloreds and slaves in pursuit of “insolent runaways over the preceding twelve years, La Grenade petitioned the Assembly in 1776 for a “Provision for myself and family and some small Pension to my wife’ in the event he were killed in subsequent service. Further, he wished “to enjoy a mark of the Public’s approbation of his past service to the colony by obtaining legislative approval for “me and my Heirs male to enjoy every Privilege as a free White Person. ”7 As it turned out, 1776 was a bad year for obtaining an immediate response to such a request. Legis¬ lators were preoccupied with the American Revolution, and sub¬ sequent political and civil affairs were interrupted by the French - capture and eventual restoration of the island. The response to La Grenade’s petition came ten years later when the Assembly decided to give him a “pair of pistols valued at fifty guineas and a sword. ”8 The bland nature of this response and the absence of special legislation on behalf of individual free coloreds throughout the period of this study—their military importance notwithstanding—would seem to suggest the need for caution in assuming that military dependence on them would automatically lead to exemptions as it had on Jamaica. What prompted the Grenada legislature to deny this request is sim¬ ply a matter of conjecture. Though demographically different from Jamaica, St. Kitts was more similar to it than either Grenada or Barbados in the passage of special laws exempting individual free coloreds from some of the harsher provisions of existing codes. According to Sio’s analysis, we would expect legislators to be only marginally concerned with accept¬ ing free coloreds to any position resembling equality with whites. To a certain point this probably holds true. Yet the legislature’s initiative in passing an enabling law in 1830 that accorded certain individual free coloreds by name—despite their opposition—the same civil

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rights as whites while indicating its willingness to act likewise for others had little to do with military considerations or the frequency ot servile insurrections.9 The fact of the matter is that the legislators acted thus in order to deny to the entire free colored group certain rights that British officials and local free coloreds were demanding^ Such action, then, was obviously based on whites perception of the political potential of the free colored community and helps us understand the degree of its solidarity. Given the growing militancy among free coloreds on St. Kitts, the general antislavery philosophy espoused by their leaders, and increasingly strident calls for change from Britain, local legislators decided that the most appropriate method of silencing the salvos was to “divide and rule. Cooptation by exemption would effectively achieve this goal. The Grenada free coloreds, on the other hand, made no pretense whatever of allying with slaves; in fact, they vehemently denied having a similarity of interests with them.10 Further, despite the emergence of a certain modicum of group solidarity by 1816, throughout the period of this study the free colored group was sufficiently divided along ethnic, religious, and class lines to obviate the need for whites to resort to the tactics employed on St. Kitts to undermine the leadership and thus weaken the group’s effectiveness. Important differences in the economic position of a sizable number of free coloreds on Grenada and St. Kitts help explain their contrast¬ ing viewpoints on slavery and ultimately why deliberate cooptation by exemption was resorted to by whites in one territory and not in the other. Free coloreds in both territories as throughout the British Caribbean engaged in a wide range of economic activities of a semi¬ skilled nature, but whereas the free coloreds on St. Kitts, with a few notable exceptions, matched their Barbados counterparts in being unable to own much agricultural land because of its general unavail¬ ability, members of the Grenada and Jamaica groups emerged as landholders who engaged in slave-based plantation agriculture on a fairly large scale.11 Despite the mounting free colored complaints in the early nineteenth century against the injustices of the politicalsocial system, whites on Grenada and Jamaica obviously knew that what these free coloreds were requesting was simply the removal of barriers operating against them rather than the creation of an egalita¬ rian society. Mavis Campbell, commenting on the Jamaican Assem¬ bly’s response to a 1792 petition from free mulattoes, points out that though assemblymen recognized the ability of the mulattoes to lead slaves into rebellion by “false representations,’ they insisted that the real object of the petitioners was to place themselves on an equal footing with whites "because they in fact had no concern for the freedom of the slaves.”12

ASSESSMENT AND EVALUATION

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The economic interests of these free coloreds had obviously inex¬ tricably become identified with those of whites. As slaveholders and planters at least, important members of Grenada’s free colored elite had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. In 1831, for exam¬ ple, merchants and planters of Grenada decided to petition the British government for, among other tilings, a “forbearance from all further inerference between the master and the slave” before a full investigation was made of all the ameliorative measures owners had implemented since 1823. A local newspaper editor expressed pleas¬ ure at the fact that several respectable free coloured gentlemen” had attended the meeting and signed the petition.13 These free col¬ oreds were obviously concerned primarily with protecting their property interests and would have paid scant attention to the inter¬ ests of slaves or even other free coloreds. Their St. Kitts counter¬ parts, by contrast, economically less identifiable with whites, could more easily see the link between their own position and that of slaves. It is to their credit that they clearly recognized the divisive intent of private bills on a free colored community that was struggling to re¬ move the manifestations of a racist ideology pervading the entire society. Similar free colored economic activities in nonplantation and nonslaveholding areas achieved different results in both territories. Although free coloreds acted as middlemen in providing goods and services in both societies, the relative importance of their contribu¬ tion differed. St. Kitts, like Barbados, possessed a fairly large number of landless whites unattached to plantations who complained of the competition from free coloreds. In contrast, Grenada’s free coloreds posed no such threat to the diminutive white population. Yet while one writer could claim of Jamaica that up to the end of the eighteenth century the only “useful” people economically were the masters and slaves, the same cannot be said of Grenada, where whites recognized and appreciated the central role of free coloreds in the island’s econ¬ omy.14 While free coloreds were accepted to some degree and race relations were somewhat cordial on Grenada, on St. Kitts, free col¬ oreds incurred the odium of whites, who perceived them as com¬ petitors for the limited nonplantation opportunities available to free persons. It is ironical, then, that Grenada should experience an uprising inspired by free coloreds at the end of the eighteenth century. In addition to the obvious racial and political factors, ethnic forces weighed heavily in this event. Had the French inheritance of whites and free coloreds been absent, legislators would probably have found it unnecessary to implement restrictive legislation and policies af¬ fecting both groups. Justified though authorities may have felt in

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acting as they did in the late 1780s and early 1790s, free coloreds rightly interpreted the passage of restrictive acts as an infringement of what by then they had come to regard as rights. This we know as a result of tracing the fortunes of the group during the critical period before 1780 rather than from 1790 or later. Although Fedon’s rebellion seemed to support the oft-expressed concerns of island whites about the untrustworthiness of individuals of African descent, the event and occurrences surrounding the period clearly point to the existence of divisions within the island’s free colored community. The 1792 address from the fifty-nine-year-old Louis La Grenade and an integrationist group of free coloreds to Governor Edward Matthew indicates without a doubt that not all free coloreds were of the same mind in embracing the French revolu¬ tionary ideology. The same can be said of the situation some thirty years later, when almost all the “respectable” free coloreds studiously dissociated themselves from the political and social ideology ex¬ pressed by the irascible Roman Catholic priest the Reverend An¬ thony O’Hannan on behalf of free coloreds and slaves.15 Because those free coloreds wishing to be associationally white had to dis¬ sociate themselves from the activities of the lower class of free col¬ oreds or indeed those whose radical ideology threatened the status quo, group solidarity naturally suffered. This is all the more regrettable considering the presence of other divisions among free coloreds. Describing the free colored popula¬ tion in the British Caribbean as a whole, Mrs. A.C. Carmichael noted in 1833 that there existed “considerable diversity of rank among them. Some of those born free, she asserted, received a “tolerably good education in Europe’’ and enjoyed “superior advantages,” whereas the great majority, obtaining all their education in their local environment, formed the lower classes.16 Such class divisions within the free colored and indeed the white community, greater in the early 1800s than the mid-eighteenth century, would obviously have varied from island to island. Additionally, factors other than simple educa¬ tional possibilities and status at birth would have contributed signifi¬ cantly to those class divisions. Both Grenada and St. Kitts differed from Jamaica in that they lacked a strict juridical interpretation of the varying degrees of race mixture ranging between the extremes of white and black. Indeed, Jamaican laws regarded as legally white all those individuals of mixed parentage who were removed from African ancestry by a certain number of generations. Yet, like Jamaica and Barbados, a rank order of color apparently existed among free coloreds on Grenada and St. Kitts. Any discussion of this from the fragmentary data available must, of course, be highly speculative, but the fact that “colored”

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slave children were freed at an earlier age and in greater proportions than “black” children indicates the operation of powerful social forces to the advantage of lightskinned individuals. Contemporary white usage of terms like “mulatto,” “mustee,” and “black” to describe individual free coloreds indicates that these terms had more than casual meaning. All things being equal, the lighter-skinned individu¬ als could expect greater job possibilities and ultimately upward socioeconomic mobility than those with darker skins. This inequality eventually fostered conflict of sorts between the free mulattoes, for example, and the free blacks, the former having felt themselves superior to the latter. As Mavis Campbell noted of Jamaica, “the mulattoes, even when slaves, considered themselves vastly superior to the ‘pure’ blacks, even when free” and “even within the mulatto group there were fissures based ... on lightness of color. ”17 Though these fissures were not as pronounced on Grenada and St. Kitts as on Jamaica, they obviously served to prevent the free coloreds as a group from realizing their full political capabilities. Yet lightness of color per se did not guarantee social acceptance by whites. On St. Kitts, island whites expressed in no uncertain terms their consternation and objection to the appointment of two light¬ skinned free coloreds as aides-de-camp to the governor. Their objec¬ tion, argued the whites, stemmed not simply from the fact that the appointees were nonwhite but also because they lacked social stand¬ ing. 18 Clearly, then, free mulattoes had to have a substantial back¬ ground and good social standing if they were to be accepted. What the reaction would have been to the appointment of wealthy free blacks can only be conjectured. Presumably the situation would not have arisen. Grenada’s free mulattoes, by contrast, had greater economic opportunities, and those who were appointed to similar honorific positions came from well-established families. Despite the obvious friction and divisions between free mulattoes and free blacks on the one hand, as well as between the free colored group as a whole and both whites and slaves, the sexual arena was one in which there was a commonality of interest and activities. Free mulattoes, especially, often mated and married outside their particu¬ lar phenotypic grouping. Similar patterns can be found in some in¬ stances between free coloreds and slaves. There is, however, no clear indication of whether or not the relationships started while freedmen were still slaves. One can speculatively assert that freedmen rather than free men of African descent were more likely to maintain sexual contacts with slaves. It has been fashionable to describe sexual relations between white males and free colored and slave women as being of a fleeting nature without any degree of permanence and mainly involving white males

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of little social standing. This myth has been partially dispelled by Edward Brathwaite, who points to a number of marriages involving free coloreds and whites in Jamaica. Some of these involved free colored men and white women.19 Three cases from Grenada of white males of some local standing marrying free colored women supply supporting evidence that such relationships were not restricted to lower-class white males. In 1830, James Briscoe Gaff, government secretary, found it necessary to marry for a second time Margaret Houston, the free colored daughter of President Andrew Houston, because of the invalidity of a prior marriage performed in 1827. James Boucher, provist-marshal general, married Jane Houston, Margaret s sister, on April 17, 1827. Evan Kennedy, postmaster and a police magistrate, was being brought to trial in 1830 for “feloniously killing his wife (a person of colour). 20 Both Gaff and Boucher obtained special gubernatorial licenses for their marriage, and Gaff was mar¬ ried at his own residence by the Anglican priest. All three marriages came to light when Father O Hannan and Chief Justice Jeffrey Hart Bent were openly attacking the Grenada establishment, which would seem to suggest that every effort was made to keep them concealed.21 Yet these marriages in themselves apparently support H.N. Col¬ eridge’s assertion of Grenada that “the prejudice of color is fainter . . . than in almost any other.” Next in line was St. Kitts in the manner in which free coloreds were treated by whites, he writes. Though the St. Kitts parish registers are silent on the question of free coloreds and whites marrying, Coleridge is unequivocal in asserting that “there are instances here of respectable white and coloured persons intermarrying, which is a conquest over the lust and most natural of prejudices.”22 Presumably there are many more instances of such interracial marriages throughout the British Caribbean than the offi¬ cial records indicate. Yet the shroud of secrecy surrounding the cases cited above raises serious doubts about the cordiality of race relations in both territories and the general acceptability of free coloreds. Frank Tannenbaum’s contention that the frequency and juridical ease of manumissions are critical in evaluating the harshness or openness of particular slave systems clearly does not seem valid for Grenada and St. Kitts.23 Legal provisions for manumissions mean exactly what they say and no more. The number of persons progres¬ sing from slavery to freedom had no a priori bearing on how these individuals and their descendents were treated as members of a free society, nor was it an automatic reflection of harmonious race rela¬ tions. Both societies developed in their own way because of geophys¬ ical and temporal influences on the inhabitants as a whole. The racial postulates of slave societies demanded that free coloreds normally be treated as inferior to whites, who would only grudgingly grant them

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extra privileges and a partial elevation ol their status as the exigencies warranted. Nevertheless, as Elsa Goveia has pointed out with respect to the Leeward Islands, there was already emerging by the end of the eighteenth century as a direct result of missionary activity “an unre¬ solved conflict between the ideas of racial equality and racial subordi¬ nation, which the missionaries themselves did not feel compelled to resolve.24 While preaching subservience and a general acceptance of the sociopolitical system, the missionaries essentially were providing slaves and free coloreds alike throughout the region with the moral, religious, and educational imperatives that would eventually lead them to question their subjugated societal position. Apart from wealth and partial European ancestry, conversion to Christianity, moral standing, and educational achievements were some of the basic criteria that whites in other parts of the region had historically con¬ sidered in granting extra privileges to free coloreds. A natural long¬ term outgrowth of missionary activity on both Grenada and St. Kitts was increasing restlessness among free coloreds and slaves, the first signs of which clearly appeared in the early nineteenth century, espe¬ cially among Grenada’s Roman Catholics. The evolutionary nature of the changes also stemmed from the dubious societal position that free coloreds as a group occupied in both territories. Neither slave nor truly free, this group consisted of members who maintained varying degrees of contacts with both white and slave populations. Responding to the racial postulates of a society that accorded them inferior status because of their African ancestry, some free coloreds, such as Louis La Grenade, deliberately attempted to put as much distance as possible between themselves and their African past. Both islands contained mulattoes in the upper levels of free colored social stratification who tended to gravitate toward the whites in order to ensure their social acceptability. Un¬ doubtedly, wealth and education also gave entry to many free blacks into this upper echelon of the free colored community. Having achieved that status, they tended to become associationally white or at least to engage in social activities that mirrored patterns already established by whites. Although hard evidence is lacking that would conclusively point to the existence of organizations specifically for certain groups of free coloreds, it seems likely that, as on Barbados, the more socially aspiring and socially accepted free coloreds had their own balls and parties to the exclusion of the “less respectable groups.25 Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the free coloreds were caught in a veritable societal bind. Common African ancestry and prevailing racial stereotypes identified them

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with slaves, and they demonstrated increasing unhappiness at being denied true freedom for which their legal status seems to have qual¬ ified them. Discrimination followed them in the militia, in the churches, in the political and legal systems, and even in death, when their remains were interred in a distinct portion ol the public cemet¬ ery assigned for nonwhites. Evolutionary change came, although hesitantly, during the 1820s as a result of free colored demands and the waning power of the planter class in both territories. Despite interisland variations based on such factors as demography, economy, and ethnicity, there was destined to be a marked continuity between the preemancipation and postemancipation periods. In the words of William Augustus Miles, free coloreds in both territories right up to 1833 still enjoyed only “the shadow of their freedom.”26

Notes Abbreviations CO CSP PP uspg

wic wmms

Colonial Office Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and the West Indies, 1661—1737, ed.W. Noel Sainsbury Parliamentary Papers United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel West India Committee Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society

Preface 1. Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen (New York, 1947). 2. David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, 1966); Davis, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (Ithaca, 1975); Gwendolyn Midlo Hall, Social Control in Slave Plantation Societies (Baltimore, 1971); Carl N. Degler, Neither Black nor White (New York, 1971); Elsa V. Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the Eighteenth Century (New Haven, 1965); Herbert S. Klein, Slavery in the Americas (Chicago, 1967). Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery (London, 1967); Franklin W. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century (Madison, 1970); Peter H. Wood, Black Majority (New York, 1974); Gerald W. Mullin, Flight and Rebellion (Oxford, 1972). 3. Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen, 69. 4. David W. Cohen and Jack P. Greene, eds., Neither Slave nor Free (Baltimore, 1972); Jerome S. Handler, The Unappropriated People (Balti¬ more, 1974); Ira Berlin, Slaves unthout Masters (New York, 1974); Mavis C.

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•

NOTES TO PAGES xii-4

Campbell, The Dynamics of Change in a Slave Society (Rutherford, N.J., 1976); Gad J. Heuman, Between Black and White (Westport, Conn., 1981). 5. Cohen and Greene, Neither Slave nor Free, 2. 6. Barry W. Higman, “The Slave Populations of the British Caribbean: Some Nineteenth-Century Variations,” in Eighteenth Century Florida and the Caribbean, ed. Samuel Proctor (Gainesville, Fla., 1976), 60-70. The term “free colored” as used in this study refers to persons of African ancestry who were either born free or later achieved free status. Accordingly, it is a generic term. Occasionally, use is made of “free mulatto” and “free black with reference to specific phenotypic categories within the entire group. 7. In addition to the works already cited, further examples are Sheila Duncker, “The Free Coloureds and Their Fight for Civil Rights in Jamaica, 1800-1830” (M.A. thesis, Univ. of London, 1960); Arnold A. Sio, “Race, Colour, and Miscegenation: The Free Coloured of Jamaica and Barbados, Caribbean Studies 16: 1 (April 1976): .5-21. Handler’s Unappropriated People is the only major work which gives detailed attention to the pre-1800 period.

Chapter 1 1. Richard B. Sheridan, An Era of West Indian Prosperity 1750-1775, (Barbados, 1970), 85; Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery (Baltimore, 1973), 150; Frank W. Pitman, The Development of the British West Indies, 1700—1763 (New Haven, 1917), 58, 379, 381; Carl Bridenbaugh and Roberta Bridenbaugh, No Peace beyond the Line (New York, 1972), 81; “A State of H.M. Leeward Caribbee Islands in America, 31st August, 1734," Great Britain, Public Record Office, CSP, XLI (1734-435), 314:iii. 2. On the economic constraints that French mercantilist policies imposed on the colonies in the late 17th century, see C.W. Cole, Colbert and a Cen¬ tury of French Mercantilism, 2 vols. (New York, 1939), 1:1-55; Stewart L. Mims, Colbert’s West India Policy (New Haven, 1912), 99-100. An excellent contemporary treatment of Grenada’s economic and political history during this early period is L'histoire de l isle de Grenade en Amerique, 1649-1659 [1659], ed. and ann. Jacques Petitjean Roget (Montreal, 1975). 3. E. Gittens Knight, The Grenada Handbook and Directory (Barbados, 1946), 22; Raymond P. Devas, The History of the Island of Grenada 16501950 (Grenada, 1964), 55-61. 4. Lowell J. Ragatz, The Fall of the Plantei' Class in the British Caribbean, 1763-1833 (New York, 1928), 114—16; Sheridan, Era of West Indian Prosperity, 85-95; “Abstract of the State of Grenada, taken April, 1772” (in Governor William Leybourne to [?], Aug. 10, 1772, CO 101/16, 101/18, Public Record Office (London); Lt. Gov. George Scott to Earl of Egremont, Jan. 17, 1763, CO 101/9. 5. “A Plain Narrative of Sundry Facts and Consequences . . . ,” Lt. Gov. Valentine Morris to [?], St. Vincent, Jan. 26, 1775, CO 101/18; “Draught of Robert Melville’s Commission as Governor of Grenada, The Grenadines, Tobago, Dominica, and St. Vincent,” Oct. 13, 1763, and “General Instruc¬ tions,” Nov. 3, 1763, CO 102/1.

NOTES TO PAGES 5-7

•

159

6. Representation of Board of Trade to King, Dec. 10, 1765, CO 101/11; Additional Instructions to Gov. Melville, Feb. 27, 1766, CO 102/1; Scott to Egremont, Jan. 19, T63, CO 101/9; Memorial of the British Protestant Inhabitants of the Island of Grenada to Gov. Melville,” Dec. 13, 1766, CO 101/11; Memorial from His Majesty s Natural-born Subjects, Possessors of Property and Actually Residing in the Island of Grenada” [1766], CO 101/12; Melville to Earl of Shelbourne, Nov. 16, 1767, CO 101/4. 7. Melville to Shelborne, Dec. 27, 1767, CO 101/12; Melville to Hills¬ borough, April 23, 1768, CO 101/12; Lt. Gov. Ulysses FitzMaurice to Hillsborough, Aug. 26, 1769, CO 101/13; Hillsborough to FitzMaurice, Nov. 4 1/69, CO 101/13; FitzMaurice to Hillsborough, Jan. 20, 1770, CO 101/14; Melville to Hillsborough, April 20, 1770, CO 101/14; FitzMaurice to Hills¬ borough, July 25, 1/71, CO 101/15; Gov. William Leybourne to Hillsborough, Dec. 6, 1771, CO 101/16; Leybourne to Assembly and Council, in Assembly, Minutes of March 9, 1772, CO 104/4; “Petition of Assembly and Council to the King," in Gov. Edward Matthew to Sydney, April 7, 1785, CO 101/26; Matthew to Sydney, Aug. 25, 1788, CO 101/28.’ 8. Henry Dundas to Lt. Gov. Ninian Home, Oct. 5, 1792, CO 101/32. The rebellion is treated in Ch. 5. 9. The helplessness of local planters can be gauged by the fact that though in both territories they loudly expressed sympathies with the American col¬ onies, they quickly cowered in the face of possible economic reprisals from Britain. See, e.g., Lt. Gov. William Young to Lord Dartmouth, June 26, 1775, CO 101/18; Assembly, Minutes, June 26, 1775, CO 152/54; Dartmouth to Payne, Oct. 3, 1774, CO 153/32; wic, Minutes, Jan. 3, 1775, and Feb. 7, 1775; Gov. William Burt to Lord Germain, March 17, 1778, CO 152/57; Germain to Burt, Aug. 5, 1778, CO 152/58; wic, Minutes, March 5, 1778. 10. James Ramsay, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Colonies (Dublin, 1784); Thomas Clarkson, On the Slav¬ ery and Commerce of the Human Species (London, 1786); PP, XXVI (1789), XXIV and XXX (1790), XXXIV (1790-91). Michael Craton, Sinews of Empire (New York, 1974) 239-80, deals succinctly with these issues. 11. For both acts, see PP, XLVII (1798—99), 967a. The material in this paragraph reflects my analysis of these acts. 12. Contemporary sentiment held that slave women were licentious, that the slave family was fragile and almost nonexistent, and that most slaves entered into unstable relationships. Recent scholarship has called into seri¬ ous question such characterizations of the slave experience in both the Caribbean and the United States. See, for example, Herbert Gutman, The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, 1750-1925 (New York, 1976); B.W. Higman, “The Slave Family and Household in the British West Indies, 1800-1834,” Jour nal of Interdisciplinary History 6:2 (1975): 261-87; Higman, “Household Structure and Fertility on Jamaican Slave Plantations: A Nineteenth Century Example,” Population Studies 21 (1973): 527-50. 13. Elliott to Bathurst, Jan. 28, 1813, CO 152/101, and Aug. 9, 1813, CO 152/102; Craton, Sinews, 271 and 375; Pres. Abraham Charles Adye to Earl of Liverpool, Feb. 1, 1812, CO 101/51. 14. [James Stephen], Reasons for Establishing a Registry of Slaves in the

160

•

NOTES TO PAGES 7-9

British Colonies (London, 1815), 70-78, as cited by D.J. Murray, I he West Indies and the Development of Colonial Government, 1801—1834 (Oxford, 1965), 94. 15. wic, Minutes, June 13, 1815; Robert Livingstone Schuyler, “The Con¬ stitutional Claims of the British West Indies,” Political Science Quarterly 40:1 (1925): 17; Bathurst to Governors of West Indian Colonies (circular), May 20,1816, PP XVII (1818), 185. Copies of both acts are in the above volume. The Grenada act was dated March 31, 1817; that of St. Kitts was dated May 17, 1817. 16. On St. Kitts, children under 10 years old formed 36 percent of the slave population in 1816, while on Grenada they constituted 20 percent. In the long run, they might have provided the basis for eventual population growth. PP, XVII (1818), 117; CO 101/61,101/66. This topic is discussed more fully in Ch. 2. For an excellent treatment of demographic features of the slave population in the British Caribbean during the early 19th century, see Higman, “Slave Populations.” 17. Murray, Development, 104—105. The testimony presented to the com¬ missioners on Grenada and St. Kitts, as well as their recommendations, is discussed in greater detail in ch. 6. 18. “Circular Letter from Lord Bathurst to Governors of Colonies Having Local Legislatures, July 9, 1823,” PP, XXIV (1824), 433-43. 19. Bathurst to Officer Commanding the Government of Grenada, Oct. 20, 1825, CO 102/18; Maxwell to Bathurst, July 4, 1823, and Aug. 27, 1823, CO 239/9; Maxwell to Bathurst, Sept. 7, 1824, CO 239/10; Maxwell to [Wilmot] Horton (Private), July 30, 1825, CO 239/12; Bathurst to Officer Com¬ manding the Government of Grenada, Aug. 20, 1825, PP, XXIX (1826), 58; Maxwell to Bathurst, April 2, 1825, and Bathurst to Maxwell, Aug. 22, 1825, PP, XXIX (1826), 75; Bathurst to Maxwell, May 21, 1826, CO 407/1. Murray, Development, 140-65, gives a good overall view of the efforts made by offi¬ cials at the Colonial Office to solve the larger constitutional issues arising from the intransigence of local legislators. A large body of information is available in correspondence between the colonies and the Colonial Office, in PP, XXVII (1828), 147-58, and PP, XXV (1829), 153. 20. Assembly, Resolves of April 27, 1832 (in Campbell to Goderich, April 28, 1832), CO 101/75; Council, Minutes, March 26, 1832, CO 241/27; Assem¬ bly, Minutes, Jan. 19, 1831, CO 241/28. 21. James Stephen, England Enslaved by Her Own Slave Colonies (Lon¬ don, 1826). Sir. R.J.W. Horton, The West India Question Practically Consid¬ ered (London, 1826). 22. "Letter from James Stephen and W.A. Garrett to Thomas Pringle, Secretary of Anti-Slavery Society, in Anti-Slavery Society, Minutes, April 11, 1832, Anti-Slavery Papers, Box E2/1, Rhodes House Library, Oxford. 23. The Grenada legislature approved the measure on March 7, 1834; that of St. Kitts did likewise on July 18, 1834. See Gov. Lionel Smith to E.G.S. Stanley, March 8, 1834, CO 101/78; Assembly, Minutes (Grenada), March 7, 1834, CO 104/13; Assembly, Minutes (St. Kitts), Dec. 5, 1833, CO 241/28; St. Kitts, Act 252, July 18, 1834, CO 240/18.

NOTES TO PAGES 10-17

•

161

Chapter 2 1. Pitting examples can be found in “State of Grenada on 31st May, 1778” (in Lord McCartney to [?], May 31, 1778), CO 101/22; Gov. Edward Matthew to Earl of Sydney, June 12, 1788, CO 101/28. 2. Acts of Feb. 7, 1790, and Dec. 23, 1790, CO 103/9; act of Sept. 30, 1800, CO 103/10. 3. See, e.g., CO 101/61, 101/66, 106/20-24, 318/106. 4. CO 152/50, 239/2, 318/106, PP, XXII (1789), 646a, pt. iv. 5. Gov. Charles Maxwell to Earl of Bathurst, May 1, 1822, CO 239/8. 6. Enclosure 6 in Maxwell to Bathurst, Feb. 10, 1826, CO 239/13. 7. Maxwell to Bathurst, May 29, 1827, CO 239/16. For a similar report in 1830, see Maxwell to Horace Twiss, Feb. 6, 1830, CO 239/22. 8. Maxwell to Bathurst, May 1, 1822, CO 239/8. 9. See Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves (Chapel Hill, 1973), 46-187; Goveia, Slave Society; Barry W. Higman, Slave Population and Economy in Jamaica, 1807—1834 (Cambridge, 1976), 1—35; Edward Brathwaite, The De¬ velopment of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770-1820 (Oxford, 1971), 3—62; Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, 15-69; Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, 54-75, 148-183, 208-232. 10. "Petition of the Assembly and Council to the King,” in Gov. William Woodley to [Earl of Hillsborough], Nov. 16, 1770, CO 152/50; W.P. Georges [Chief Justice of St. Kitts] to Duke of Portland, March 22, 1798, CO 152/78; Lord Lavington to Earl of Hobart, Nov. 21, 1803, CO 152/85. 11. See, e.g., Maxwell to Bathurst, May 29, 1827, CO 239/16. 12. Gov. Charles Shipley to Sir George Beckwith, Sept. 11,1813, and Nov. 7, 1813, CO 101/53; Gov. Frederick Maitland to Rt. Hon. William Wyndham, April 12, 1806, CO 101/46. 13. Pres. Abraham Charles Adye to Earl of Camden, Feb. 15, 1805 (with answers to Heads of Enquiry), CO 101/42. 14. “St. Christopher, Capitulation to the French, 1782; Signed by the Leading Citizens,” Government Archives, St. Kitts. The document is very brittle and almost illegible, but the names of the signatories are essentially clear. 15. Gov. James Campbell to Viscount Goderich, April 6, 1833, CO 101/76. After the passing of the 1831 Election Law, free coloreds and slaves were officially returned as one group. 16. Gov. Maxwell to Sir George Murray, Feb. 27, 1830, CO 239/22. 17. See, e.g., acts of Feb. 7, 1790, and Dec. 23, 1790, CO 103/9. 18. Gov. Frederick Maitland to Hon. John Harvey [President of Council], April 13, 1806, and Maitland to Assembly (in Assembly, Journals of June 27, 1806), CO 101/43. 19. Harvey to Maitland, April 17, 1806, CO 101/43. 20. Ragatz, The Fall of the Planter Class. Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery, 33—51; Pitman, British West Indies, 30-41. 21. W.P. Georges to Duke of Portland, March 22, 1798, CO 152/78; McCartney to Germain, June 30, 1776, CO 101/20.

162

•

NOTES TO PAGES 17-26

22. Maitland to Harvey, April 20, 1806, CO 101/43. The ethnic divisions in these territories are treated more fully in ch. 5. 23. Shipley to Bathurst, Nov. 7, 1813, CO 101/53. 24. Such a sexual disproportion in the white population was not always present on St. Kitts. In 1770, for example, the island’s 2,746 whites consisted of 765 men capable of bearing arms, 21 superannuated men, 889 women, 528 boys, and 543 girls. Gov. Woodley to Earl of Hillsborough, Jan. 24, 1770, CO 152/50. 25. PP, XVII (1818), 117; CO 101/61, 101/66. Of a total 32,131 slaves in Grenada in 1805, children under 12 years old numbered 7,168, or 22 percent of the total. Lt. Gov. Abraham Charles Adye to Earl of Camden, Feb. 15, 1805, CO 101/42. 26. Maxwell to Horton, Nov. 10, 1826, CO 239/14.

‘Abstract of Queries

Proposed by the Royal College of Physicians of London . . . With Replies Thereto,” Answer 2, Houston to Murray, June 26, 1829, CO 101/69. 27. CO 318/117; “State of the Slave Registration of St. Christopher” (clip¬ pings from St. Christopher Advertiser), Maxwell to Horton, Nov. 10, 1826, CO 239/14. 28. Lt. Gov. Ninian Home to Henry Dundas, July 16, 1793, CO 101/33. 29. Act of April 21, 1767, CO 101/1; “List of Acts Sent to Lord Shelbourne’ (in Governor Melville’s of Oct. 7, 1767), CO 101/11. 30. “Extracts of Letters from J.W. Tobin Esq. of Nevis,” July 28,1811, and Aug. 16, 1811, CO 152/98. 31. “Abstract of Queries,” Answer 3, Houston to Murray, June 26, 1829, CO 101/69. Shipley to Bathurst, Nov. 7,1813, CO 101/53. On mortality among whites in the British Caribbean, see Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 300-34. 32. “State of the Free Coloured Inhabitants of Grenada in the Year 1787,” in Matthew to Sydney, April 12, 1788, CO 101/28. 33. “Return of Free Black and Coloured Population, 1821-24,” in Campbell to Bathurst, Feb. 21, 1826, CO 101/66. 34. Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies in Four Volumes (Philadelphia, 1806), II: 222. Henry Nelson Coleridge, Six Months in the West Indies in 1825, 3rd ed. (London, 1832), 99. 35. The best treatment of the process of creolization in the British Carib¬ bean is Edward Brathwaite’s study on Jamaica. See his Creole Society, espe¬ cially ch. 19. 36. See, e.g., “Records of Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials, 1762-1826, ” St. Anns Church Records, Sandy Point, St. Kitts; "Register of Marriages, 1826-1868, St. George-Basseterre, Basseterre Anglican Church, St. Kitts; "Register of Burials, Baptisms, and Marriages, 1813-1861,” Anglican church, St. George’s, Grenada. 37. Campbell to Bathurst, May 31, 1826, CO 101/66. 38. Fuller treatment of the free coloreds' struggle for civil rights is to be found in ch. 6. On the role of the phenotypically colored in die political culture of Jamaica, see Campbell, Dynamics of Change, 118-196; Heuman, Between Black and White, 23-30.

NOTES TO PAGES 27-36

•

163

39. Handler, U nappropriated People, 16-21; Brathwaite, Creole Society, 169; Higman, Slave Population, 45-71. 40. Blue Books, 1829, CO 106/23. With respect to the immediate post¬ emancipation period in the British Caribbean, the general assumption has always been that former slaves left the plantation environment in great num¬ bers with the coming of emancipation. Recent evidence suggests the need to revise this view and consider why former slaves remained in the plantation environment rather than moving to the urban centers. See Douglas Hall, “The Flight from the Estates Reconsidered: The British West Indies, 183842,' Journal of Caribbean History, 10-11 (1978): 7-24; Michael Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), 275-384. 41. “Petition of the Speaker and Assembly to the King,” Sept. 10,1825, CO 101/65. 42. St. Andrew’s Journal and Colonial Miscellany, No. 1, 1829, e.g., car¬ ries an advertisement requesting information that could lead to the arrest of persons who broke into a store at Mulatto Town. Present-day oral reports suggest that modern Harford Village is the site of this former town.

Chapter 3 1. Act of April 29, 1767, CO 103/1, “Account of the Appropriation of the money raised by the act of the Legislature of Grenada for 1767, dated 15th Nov., 1767,” Assembly, Minutes, CO 101/12. Assembly, Minutes, Oct. 13, 1766, Dec. 10, 1766, CO 101/12. 2. “An Act to Manumit and Set Free a Certain Negro Woman Slave named Pauline,” Dec. 28, 1786, CO 103/8. 3. Assembly, Minutes, May 20, 1773, CO 341/11. 4. “Articles of Charge against Robert Melville Esq. ...” (in Colonel Johnstone to [?], Oct. 3, 1769), CO 101/13. 5. For an examination of the incidence of such legislative acts in the case of Jamaica, see Orlando Patterson, “Slavery and Slave Revolts: A SocioHistorical Analysis of the First Maroon War, 1655-1740, Social and Economic Studies 19 (Sept. 1970): 289-325. 6. Act of April 21, 1767, CO 103/1. 7. “Will of Louis La Grenade, Sept. 20, 1808Wills, vol. M, 39, Grenada Archives. “Will of Narcis Clozier, Oct. 7, 1826, Wills, vol. V2, 381. Grenada Archives. 8. “A Return of all Manumissions Effected by Purchase, Bequests, or Otherwise, Since the First Day of January, 1808, up to the Thirtieth Day of September, 1821,” Enclosure 3 in Maxwell to Bathurst, May 1, 1822, CO 239/8. 9. Vere L. Oliver, ed., Caribbeana: Being Miscellaneous Papers Relating to the History, Genealogy, Topography, and Antiquities of the British West Indies, 6vols. (London, 1902-19), IIP 193. Manumission dated June 5, 1815, “Manumissions, 1780-1820 (1 bundle of 200),” Government Archives, St. Kitts.

164

•

NOTE S TO PAGE S .36-50

10. “Return of all Manumissions . . . CO 239/8. 11. “Will of Louis La Grenade.” “Will of Narcis Clozier.” 12. Act of April 21, 1767, CO 103/1. 13. “A Return of all Manumissions Recorded in the Registry Office of the Island of Grenada Effected by Purchase, Bequests, or Otherwise, 1808 to 1821,” CO 101761; “Return of Males and Females Manumitted in the Colony of Grenada during the last seven years . . . ,” CO 101/67. List of Manumis¬ sions Recorded in the Registrar’s Office of the Island of Grenada, 1817—1830, CO 101767, 101775. Because the validity of any act of manumission was en¬ sured only when it was officially recorded, I have assumed that all those recorded at any time were actually manumitted. In fact, it is extremely likely that some persons were manumitted without having the act of manumission recorded. 14. “Manumissions, 1817—1830,

CO 101761, 101767, 239/13. In addition to

the figures given above for St. Kitts, there were 9 male and 13 female manumittees whose ages were not recorded. 15. This information is extracted from Manumission Returns in CO 101/75, 239/13, 239/22. In a small number of cases there was no indication as to whether or not owners received payments for the slaves manumitted. 16. “Return of Slaves Manumitted 1st Jan. 1821 to 31st Dec. 1824, Campbell to Bathurst, Feb. 23, 1826, CO 101766. For parochial distribution of the slave population between 1812 and 1830, see ch. 2, table 2—/. 17. Mrs. A.C. Carmichael, Domestic Manners and Social Condition of the White, Coloured, and Negro Population of the West Indies, 2 vols. (London, 1833), 1:91. 18. This is abstracted and computed from CO 101766, 101767, 239/13. 19. For a discussion of the emergence of kin and quasi-kin networks among slaves in the United States, see Gutman, The Black Family, esp. 185-229. On the Caribbean, Barry Higman s pioneering works are standard for readers interested in this phenomenon. See, e.g., “Household Structure and Fertil¬ ity,” 527-50, and “The Slave Family and Household,” 261-87. 20. See, e.g., “Act to Prevent the Further Sudden Increase of Free Ne¬ groes and Mulattoes,” April 21,1767, CO 103/1; act of Feb. 16,1791, CO 103/9; act of April 2, 1792, CO 103/9; Act 89, April 21, 1798, CO 240/15; “Circular Letter from Earl of Bathurst to Governors of Colonies Having Local Legisla¬ tures,” July 9, 1823, CO 318/22. 21. Coleridge, Six Months, 290. 22. “Manumissions, 1781-1826,” Government Archives, St. Kitts. “Re¬ turn of Manumissions, 1820-1826, CO 101767. 23. In Grenada’s total slave population of 25,667 and 24,972 in 1821 and 1824, respectively, there were 1,816 and 1,924 “colored,” respectively. For total slave population, see table 2-2; for “colored slaves, see “Return of Coloured Population in the Island of Grenada, ” Campbell to Bathurst, May 31, 1826, CO 101766. 24. Gov. James Campbell to Sir George Murray, Jan. 1, 1829, CO 101769; Gov. Charles Maxwell to Earl of Bathurst, Feb. 11, 1824, CO 239/10. The collector of customs submitted periodic returns of the number of slaves in this category who were under his charge as well as the number of those freed.

NOTE S TO PAGE S 50-55

•

165

Between 1828 and 1831, 9 such slaves were manumitted on Grenada. On St. Kitts, the collector of customs reported in 1829 that of 32 creoles and 12 Africans held during that year, 19 and 7, respectively, had been freed. See “List of Captured Negroes Manumitted in Grenada,’ CO 101769, 101775; Maxwell to Murray, July 24, 1829 (with enclosure), CO 239/20. 25. Jas. Stephen, Jr., to Robt. Wilmot Horton, May 30, 1823, CO 239/9. 26. See, e.g., Goderich to Campbell [1832], CO 101775. The secretary of state had this circular letter sent to all governors in the Caribbean. The most notorious case of the legal ramifications of escheated slaves involved the Alexander family on Grenada. Elizabeth Alexander had petitioned in 1817 to have her freedom and that of her children confirmed. Apparently she had been the slave of Javotte Alexander, a free black woman. Javotte died intes¬ tate in 1802, and her slaves then sought their freedom from Javotte’s cred¬ itors. The freedom of Elizabeth was confirmed in 1817, but that of her chil¬ dren and sister was not confirmed until 1832. Gov. Phineas Riall to Earl of Bathurst, June 8, 1817, CO 101757; Bathurst to Riall, Sept. 6,1817, CO 102/18; “Petition of Mark Alexander, a Free Coloured Man,” CO 101775; Campbell to Goderich, Aug. 10, 1832, CO 101775. In this letter, Campbell informed Goderich that the title of the slaves was in dispute and that he lacked money to initiate an inquest. 27. Act of April 21, 1767, CO 103/1. 28. Act of Feb. 16, 1791, CO 103/9. 29. Act of Dec. 9, 1797, CO 103/10. This act was generally called the Guardian Act. 30. Act 89, April 21, 1798, CO 240/15. 31. A.M. Belisario to [??], “Extracts and Substance of every Clause of the Meliorating Act Passed by the General Council of the Leeward Islands . . . with Remarks and Recommendations,” Oct. 18, 1811, CO 152/100. 32. Act 98 of July 19, 1802, CO 240/15. 33. Samuel J. Hurwitz and Edith F. Hurwitz, “A Token of Freedom: Pri¬ vate Bill Legislation for Free Negroes in Eighteenth Century Jamaica,’ William and Alary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 24 (1967):423-31. 34. Gov. Edward Maitland to Hon. Hugh Wyndham, Nov. 9, 1806, CO 101744; act of Oct. 25, 1806, CO 103/10; see also PP, XIX (1816), 313. 35. The Grenada act was dated March 5, 1817; that of St. Kitts was dated May 17, 1817. For copies, see PP, XVII (1818), 115-24 and 165-74, respec¬ tively. 36'. Act of July 18, 1818, CO 103/11; see also PP, XVIII (1819), 312-13; “Return of Manumissions Effected in Grenada from 1st Jan. 1808 to 3rd July, 1821, with State of Fines Paid,” CO 101761. 37. “An Act for the Relief of Persons Manumitted by Last Will and Testa¬ ment, or thereby Directed to be Manumitted,

July 27, 1818, CO 103/11; also

PP, XVIII (1819), 313-14. 38. See, e.g., Bathurst to Campbell, March 19, 1826, CO 102/20; Maxwell to Bathurst, Oct. 22, 1823, and Maxwell to Wilmot Horton (Private), Oct. 23, 1823, CO 239/9. “Circular Letter from Earl of Bathurst to the Governors of Colonies Having Local Legislatures,” July 9, 1823, CO 239/9. 39. Bathurst to Campbell, March 19, 1826, CO 102/20; Bathurst to Max-

166

•

NOTES TO PAGES 55-61

well, March 19, 1826, CO 407/1; “Comments of [Fielding] Browne [Solicitor General] to Gov. Campbell on the Proposed Laws,” July 28,1826, CO 101/66. 40. Assembly, Minutes, Nov. 3, 1826, CO 241/26. 41. “Comments on the Order-in-Council, 1823—31,” CO 318/117. 42. Act of April 21, 1767, CO 103/1. 43. “List of Persons Committed to the Gaol as Runaways, but Who De¬ clared Themselves to be Free, Jan. 1808—Dec. 1821,’ CO 101/66; A Return of Persons Lodged in the Common Gaol of St. Christopher from the 1st Day of May to the 31st Day of December, 1821, as Slaves, but who Declared Them¬ selves to be Free,” Enclosure 5 in Maxwell to Bathurst, May 1, 1822, CO 239/8. 44. Act of Feb. 16, 1791, CO 103/9; act of April 2, 1792, CO 103/9. 45. Act 98, July 19, 1802, CO 240/15. 46. “Police Report,” in Grenada Free Press and Public Gazette, Oct. 7, 1829, clipping in CO 101/72. 47. Gov. James Leith to Earl of Bathurst (Leeward Islands, Civil, No. 34), Jan. 7, 1816, CO 152/106. For similar instances of free coloreds in St. Kitts advertised for sale as runaways because they could not prove their freedom, see St. Christopher Gazette and Charibbean Courier 1:28 Nov. 17, 1815, CO 152/105. 48. E.L. Joseph, History of Trinidad (Trinidad, 1837), 166—67, as cited by James Millette, The Genesis of Crown Colony Government (Trinidad, 1970), 17—18. See also act of July 5, 1784, CO 103/7. Useful information on the disputes arising from such abductions can be obtained from CO 101/29-31. 49. “Return of Manumissions Executed between 1st January 1821 and 31st December 1825, Which Have Been Recorded in the Registrar’s Office in the Island of Grenada,” CO 101/66; “A Return of Manumissions Effected in the Island of St. Christopher, Taken from the Records in the Registrar’s Office as Entered and Recorded there since 1st January 1821, with the Respective Dates of the same, ” in Maxwell to Bathurst, Feb. 10, 1826, CO 239/13. 50. Maxwell to Bathurst, Feb. 10, 1826, CO 239/13.

Chapter 4 1. Council, Minutes, April 3, 1773, CO 104/5. 2. State of the Island of Grenada, 1772 Aug. 10, 1772), CO 101/16.

(in Governor Levbourne to [?]

3. "Abstract from the Capitation Rolls of the Islands of Grenada and Carriaeou for the year 1763” (in Colonel Scott to [?], March 15, 1763), CO 101/1. 4. McCartney to Germain, Nov. 30, 1776, CO 101/20; “Will of Louis La Grenade”; Grenada Deeds, G2, E3, Q3, F4, H4, K4, L4, X4; Gavin Smith, Reference to the Plan of the Island of Grenada, August 1824 (London, 1882). For other transactions involving Louis La Grenade, Jr., see Grenada Deeds H5, 15, K5, P5, Q5. 5. Grenada Deeds, Gl, HI, K3, Y3, H4. 6. Grenada Deeds C4, 14; “Return of Forfeited Estates, Slaves, Etc. 1794 and Their State in 1797” (in Governor Green to [?], July 14,1797), CO 106/12.

NOTE S TO PAGE S 62-69

•

167

The Belvidere estate, which Julien Fedon had purchased in 1791 for £15,000 current money, was reported in 1797 as being “in the possession of the mortgager who sold it to Fedon, but never received any part of the purchase money” (Smith, Reference). 7. “State of the Island of Grenada,” CO 101/16. 8. Sheridan, Sugar and Slavery, 231. Of the 600 acres composing the sugar plantation, only about 266 acres were actually under sugar cultivation. 9. Grenada Deeds F4; Smith, Reference. 10. “Abstract from the Capitation Rolls,” CO 101/1. 11. State of the Island of Carriaeou (in Governor Leybourne to [?] Aug. 10, 1772), CO 101/16. Fourteen persons whose status was not reported and who might have been free coloreds owned 464 acres and 153 slaves. “State of the Island of Carriaeou, 1775’ (in Lieutenant Governor Young to [?] Sept. 1, 1775), CO 101/18, pt.3. 12. "Replies to Heads of Enquiry,” Answer 31, Assembly, Minutes, May 28, 1788, CO 101/29. 13. “Schedule of Population and Produce of the Island of Carriaeou, taken 1st September, 1790, " CO 101/31; “Return of Forfeited Estates,” CO 106/12; Smith, Reference. 14. Sidney W. Mintz, Caribbean Transformations (Chicago, 1974), 146-56. 15. Act of April 20, 1767, CO 103/1; act of March 26, 1784, CO 103/6; act of Oct. 13, 1784, CO 103/7. 16. Council, Minutes, Aug. 15, 1763, CO 241/9. Assembly, Minutes, Oct. 24, 1769, CO 241/14. 17. Assembly, Minutes, Oct. 25. 1773, CO 241/11; act of May 4, 1790, CO 240/14. 18. Mintz, Caribbean Transformations' see also Sidney W. Mintz, “Slav¬ ery and the Rise of Peasantries,” Historical Reflections, 6:1 (Summer 1979); 213—42. Other pioneering works on Caribbean peasantries are W.K. Mar¬ shall, “Peasant Development in the West Indies since 1838,” Social and Economic Studies, 17:3 (Sept. 1968): 252-63; Rawle Farley, “The Rise of the Peasantry in British Guiana, Social and Economic Studies, 2:4 (1954):87103. 19. Assembly, Minutes, Sept. 3,1824, CO241/25; Assembly, Minutes, Jan. 25, 1788, CO 101/29. 20. “Return of Female African and Creole Negroes . . .

(Schedule A),

CO 101/67. 21. For a discussion of this practice among whites in the Caribbean, see Richard Sheridan, The Development of the Plantations to 1750 (Barbados, 1970), 57-61. 22. Vere Langford Oliver, ed., The Monumental Inscriptions of the British West Indies (London, 1927), 134-35. See also the 1827 issues of the St. Christ¬ opher Advertiser and Weekly Intelligencer. See, for an example of some of the things he inherited from his father’s estate, St. Christopher Advertiser, Nov. 16, 1824. 23. “Petitions of William Priddie,

Council, Minutes, Aug. 25, 1763, CO

241/9; Assembly, Minutes, Aug. 25, 1777, CO 241/11. 24. “Heads of Enquiry,” Answer 31, Assembly, Minutes, May 28, 1788,

168

•

NOTES TO PAGES 69-76

CO 101/29. See also “Evidence of Sir Alexander Campbell, PP, XXIX (1790), 698. 25. PP, XX (1831-32), 158, Answer 1959; 233, Answer 3154; “Additional Heads of Enquiry and Answers,” Answer l(in Lieutenant Governor Matthew to [?], May 17, 1788), CO 101/28. 26. Robert Adam to Bishop of London, May 6,1823, USPG, Fulham Papers, vol. 2 (West Indies, pt. 1,1803-27); “Sixth Report of the Branch Association of the Island of St. Christopher,” CO 239/29; “Seventh Report . . . ,

CO

239/35. 27. Eighth Annual Report of the Grenada Society for the Education of the Poor (Grenada, 1832), 12. Of the other 101 students, 42 had “moved to distant quarters of the island and residing there with their parents, 9 had joined the church schools, 9 had been expelled, 2 girls were married, 17 had left the island, and 22 had died. 28. “Return Shewing Average Price in Sterling of the Wages of the Ag¬ ricultural and other Labourers, Distinguishing the Rate per diem when the Labourer works Only Occasionally from that Wherein he works under En¬ gagement for the Whole year," CO 101/67. 29. “Petition of Francis Alexander Robertson, dated 10th September, 1807,” in Assembly, Minutes, Sept. 12, 1807, CO 104/8; “Return of the Number of Schools, Etc., in the Colony of Grenada,’ Dec. 31, 1826, CO 318/106. 30. “Return of Number of Persons Drawing Their Subsistence in Whole or Part from Poor Rates or any Other Public Fund During the Last Seven Years,” CO 101/67; “Account of all Sums Paid During the year 1821 by Way of Parochial Relief to Paupers in the Island of St. Christopher,” CO 239/10; Assembly, Minutes, March 3, 1830, CO 241/33. 31. “Return of Male African and Creole Negroes . . . ,” CO 101/67. 32. Act 94, May 28, 1801, CO 240/15. 33. Ibid.; Act 116, July 1, 1811, CO 240/16. 34. For St. Kitts, see “Triennial Return of Slaves, 1829, ” 341; for Grenada, CO 101/1, 101/16. 35. Blue Books, 1823-27, CO 106/17-21. 36. For St. Kitts, “Original Register of Slaves, 1818”; “Triennial Return of Slaves,” 1828, 1835. For Grenada, Slave Returns, 1818, 1832. 37. “Original Register . . . , 1818,” 72, 78, 110, 324. 38. Grenada Wills V2, 691, 780. 39. “Will of Francis Blake, January 6, 1805, Deeds 03, 1805-1807; Ordi¬ nary Records B, 1826-36, 410. 40. “Triennial Return . . . , 1829,” 245, 327. 41. Ibid., 185; Grenada Wills V2, 702. 42. “Triennial Return . . . , 1829,” 166, 167, 262. 43. “Triennial Return . . . , 1835,” 191, 272.

Chapter 5 1. The best modern treatment of the entire revolutionary period on St. Domingue remains C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York, 1963).

NOTESTO PAGES 76-80

•

169

Other useful works are Philip D. Curtin, “The Declaratoin of the Rights of Man in Saint-Domingo, 1788—1791,’ Hispanic American Historical Review 30 (May 1950): 162—66; Janies G. Leyburn, The Haitian People (New Haven, 1941); Thomas O. Ott, The Haitian Revolution, 1789-1804 (Knoxville, 1973); George F. Tyson, Jr,. Toussaint L Ouverture (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973). 2. Exceptions are Roger N. Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats (New Haven, 1979); Eugene D. Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution (Baton Rouge, 1979); David Brion Davis, Slavery in the Age of Revolution. 3. Pres. Francis McKenzie to Duke of Portland, March 28, 1795, CO 101734. Useful though not altogether unbiased accounts of the uprising are D.G. Garraway, A Short Account of the Insurrection (Grenada, 1877); John Hay, Narrative of the Insurrection in the Island of Grenada (London, 1823); Gordon Turnbull, A Narrative of the Revolt and Insurrection in the Island of Grenada (London, 1796); Thomas Turner Wise, A Review of the Events Which Have Happened in Grenada, From the Commencement of the Insur¬ rection to the 1st. of May (Grenada, 1795). 4. James, Black Jacobins, 62-84; Shelby T. McCloy, The Negro in the French West Indies (Lexington, Ky., 1966), 72-77; Jacques Binoche, “Les deputes d’outremer pendant la Revolution Franfaise," Annales historiques de la Revolution Franqaise 231 (1978): 45-77. For discussion of the actions of Victor Hugues throughout the British Caribbean, see J.W. Fortesque, A History of the British Army, 14 vols. (London, 1906-34), IV:424—56. 5. “Proclamation Against the Insurgents by His Honour the President and Council, March 4, 1795, and “President and Council’s Command in Answer to Julien Fedon’s and Besson’s Summon,’’ McKenzie to Portland, March 28, 1795, CO 101734. 6. “Arrete, Port de la Liberte, le ii Germinal, ler au 3e de la Republique Frangaise, Une et Indivisible,’’ ibid.; Turnbull, Narrative, 104-105. 7. “Copy of a Letter From the Unfortunate Prisoners in Belvidere Camp, Containing a Second Summons from Julien Fedon, Dated the 6th March, and Rec’d the Same Day by a Flag of Truce, ” McKenzie to Portland, March 28, 1795, CO 101734. 8. McKenzie to Portland, March 28, 1795, CO 101734; Wise, Review, 54. 9. “General Comparative State of the Militia of Grenada on 3rd March, 1795, and on 30th April, 1796,’ CO 101734; Devas, History, 14, erroneously asserts that at the outbreak of hostilities there were 293 regulars on the island—103 of whom were fit for duty—and 900 militiamen. 10. Devas, History, 131-40. The three persons whose lives were spared were Dr. John Hay, Mr. Ker, and Rev. Francis McMahon. 11. McKenzie to Portland, Aug, 11, 1795, CO 101734. 12. Knight, Grenada Handbook, 33—34. Devas, History, 154 n. 12, asserts that the word Bulam is derived from Bulama (Bolama), an island off the coast of Portuguese Guinea. Apparently the fever was first brought to Grenada on a vessel from that island and thus got its name. Reportedly akin to blackwater fever, it may actually have been yellow fever. 13. Ibid., 34-35; Devas, History, 151-53. 14. Pres. Alexander Houston to Duke of Portland, July 30, 1796, CO 1017 34. 15. Robert Forster and Jack P. Greene, eds., Preconditions of Revolution

170

•

NOTES TO PAGES 81-86

in Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, 1970), 17; Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Slave Revolts,” 318-25. Marion D. deB. Kilson also deals with some of these precipitants with relation to slave revolts in the United States in “To¬ wards Freedom: An Analysis of Slave Revolts in the United States,” Phylon 25 (2nd Quarter, 1964), 175-87. See also Genovese, From Rebellion to Revo¬ lution, 11-12, for a useful general analysis. 16. Gov. Leybourne to Assembly and Council, March 9, 1772, CO 104/4. 17. McCartney to Germain, Jan. 10, 1779, CO 101/23; “Extract Copy of Hon. Alex Sympson’s Letter,” Jan. 11, 1787, CO 101/27. 18. Matthew to Sydney, Aug. 25, 1788, CO 101/28; Henry Dundas to Lieut. Gov. Ninian Home, Oct. 5, 1792, CO 101/32. 19. Gov. Melville to Earl of Hillsborough, May 10, 1768, CO 101/12; see also Act 29, Feb. 20, 1770, CO 103/1. 20. “State of Grenada on 31st May, 1778” (in Lord McCartney to [??] May 31, 1778), CO 101/22. Of a total 1,370 men of arms-bearing age then in the island, 790 were English-born, or “old,” subjects, 325 were French-born, or “new,” subjects, and 256 were mulattoes and mestizos. 21. Act of Dec. 28, 1786, CO 103/8. 22. Assembly, Minutes, Oct. 24, 1788, CO 101/29; act of May 1, 1789, CO 103/9. 23. Governor Woodley to Lord Grenville, Jan. 2, 1792, CO 152/72; Woodley to Dundas, Feb. 20, 1792, and Dec. 28, 1792, CO 152/73; Dundas to Woodley, Feb. 21, 1793, CO 152/72; Woodley to Dundas, March 13,1793, CO 152/72. 24. Act 79, July 7,1794, CO 240/14; Stanley to Portland, Oct. 31, 1794, CO 152/75. 25. Matthew to Grenville, Jan. 7, 1791, CO 101/31. Dundas to Matthew, Dec. 22, 1791, CO 101/31; also CO 102/16. 26. "The Humble Address of the Free Coloured Inhabitants of Grenada to Governor Matthew, Jan. 10,1792 (enclosure in Matthew to Dundas, Jan. 10, 1792), CO 101/32. Apart from La Grenade, other signatories were Jn. Pre. Saulger, J. Austin, Joseph Calhoun, C. Martin, and Joseph Clearkly. 27. Pres. Samuel Williams to Dundas, July 4, 1792, CO 101/32; Williams to Dundas, Dec. 28,1792, CO 101/33. Home to Dundas, Feb. 9,1793, and Aug. 1, 1794, CO 101/33. 28. Sir William Young, The West-India Common Place Book (London, 1807), as quoted by Richard B. Sheridan, “Comments on Papers Presented at the A.H.A. Annual Meeting, 1979, 8 (mimeographed copy in author's pos¬ session). 29. Devas, FUstory, 114; see also Home to Dundas, Julv 16,1793, and Dec. 31, 1793, CO 101/33. 30. Stanley to Dundas, Feb. 18, 1794, and Aug. 2, 1794, CO 152/75. 31. General Return of the Militia of this Government and a State of their Arms and Accoutrements” (in Lieutenant Governor to [?], March 9 1793) CO 101/33. 32. Home to Dundas, April 7, 1/94, CO 101/33. Rather than supply Home with the extra forces he requested, Gen. Charles Grey actually asked diat Grenada supply between 250 and 300 white men to assist him in an attack

NOTES TO PAGES 86-95

•

171

being planned on Guadeloupe; Home to Grey, April 7, 1794, and Aug. 25 1794; Home to Portland, Sept. 16, 1794; Grey to Home, Aug. 16, 1794, CO 101/33. 33.

General State ol the Militia of the Island of Grenada, as Mustered 7th

Aug. 1794" (in Lieutenant Governor Home to [?], Sept. 6, 1794), CO 101/33. 34. Home to Matthew Byles, Vfc past 8 o’clock, in McKenzie to Portland, March 28, 1795, CO 101/34'. 35. Buckley, Slaves in Red Coats, 17—18, 82—83; Beatrice Brownrigg, The Life and Letters of Sir John Moore (New York, 1923), 54-73. A.T. Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution arid Empire, 1793-1812, 2 vols. (New York, 1968), 1:114-18. 36.

Deeds

(Grenada Archives) X3, Y3, C4, F4, H4, 14; “Beturn of For¬

feited Estates, Slaves, Etc., 1794’ (in Governor Green to [?] July 14, 1797),

Review, 8; Turnbull, Narrative, Genesis, 23—25.

CO 106/12; Wise, 37. Millette, 38.

16.

Houston to Portland, July 30, 1796, CO 101/34; Representation of the

Assembly of Grenada to Gov. Phineas Riall [1816], CO 101/57. 39. Address of Council to President, May 12, 1795, and McKenzie to Port¬ land, Aug. 11, 1795, CO 101/34; act of Aug.' 1, 1795, CO 103/9; act of Dec. 2, 1796, CO 103/10. 40. Act of Aug. 8, 1795, CO 103/9. The information on the sentences is abstracted from returns in CO 101/35. 41. Green to Portland, May 27, 1797, CO 101/35. 42. Act of Dec. 27, 1797, CO 103/10. 43. Ibid.

Chapter 6 1.

The Memorial of H.M.’s Subjects of Colour of the Island of St. Christ¬

opher, to Henry Maddox and Fortunatus Dwarris, Esquires, H.M.’s Com¬ missioners of Inquiry into the Administration of Justice in the Colonies,” Nov. 24, 1823, CO 318/76. See also Act 71 of 1727, CO 240/4. 2. Act of April 23, 1792, CO 103/9. 3. Act 166, June 26, 1820, CO 240/16. 4. "Third Report of the Commissioners of Inquiry into the Administration of Civil and Criminal Justice,

PP,

XXIV (1826-27), 57.

5. Council, Minutes, Feb. 19, 1829, CO 241/27; “Political State of the Free Coloured Inhabitants of the Island of St. Christopher

(enclosure in Ralph B.

Cleghorn to Sir George Murray, May 5, 1830), CO 239/23; Assembly, Min¬ utes, Aug. 17, 1827, CO 104/12' 6. Assembly, Minutes, July 18, 1769, CO 104/3. 7. “First Report of the Commissioners ...” 8.

PP,

XV (1825), 221.

Memorial of Grenada’s Free Coloreds, May 26, 1823, CO 318/76.

9. Ibid. 10. Act 32, April 3, 1770, CO 103/3. 11. Act 33, April 3, 1770, CO 103/3. 12. Act of May 1, 1789, CO 103/9.

172 13.

•

NOTES TO PAGES 95-101

Memorial of Grenada’s Free Coloreds, CO 318/76.

14. “Political State of the Free Colored Inhabitants, ” CO 239/23. In 1791, one John McIntosh of Grenada submitted to the legislature a proposal for constructing the dividing walls in the cemetery, Assembly,

Minutes,

CO

101/32. 15. For Priddies case, see Council, Minutes, Aug. 25, 1763, CO 241/9; for La Grenade, Ra[lph] Abercrombie to [Duke of Portland], Nov. 18, 1797, CO 101735. 16. Ainslee to Liverpool, March 18, 1813, CO 101/52. 17. “Evidence of Samuel Agard,” Shipley to Bathurst, Sept. 14, 1813, CO 101/53. 18. A Landed Proprietor to Bathurst, Oct. 6, 1814, CO 152/104. 19.

For the text of the petition,

see “Extracts from the Minutes of the

Honourable the House of Assembly of Grenada and its Dependencies,” April 18, 1813, in Shipley to Bathurst, Sept. 14, 1813, CO 101/53. 20. Michel had certainly not run foul of this act.

Felix Palmer, private

secretary to the governor, testified subsequently that Michel had completed the necessary legal requirements and that one Mr. Waugh had “administered the oath to him on the 2nd December last at the Government House in the presence of the Vice-Governor,” Evidence of Felix Palmer, in Shipley to Bathurst, Sept. 14, 1813, CO 101/53. 21. “Extract of Assembly Minutes, May 1, 1813,” ibid. 22. Ainslee to Liverpool, March 18, 1813, CO 101/52. 23.

Bathurst to Shipley, July 13,1813, and Dec. 4,1813, CO 102/18; Shipley

to Bathurst, Sept. 14, 1813 (with enclosures), CO 101/53, and Jan. 29, 1814 (with enclosures), CO 101/54. Having won the suit he filed against the market clerk, Michel was awarded damages of only £5, prompting Bathurst to ques¬ tion “the grounds upon which the Court awarded such immoderate damages to the Plaintiff.” 24. “Extract ofa Letter to Thomas Harrison, Esq., Secretary of the African Institution, dated Antigua, Oct. 27, 1815,”

West-India Comnwn Place Book,

259 (copy of page in CO 152/106). 25. Ibid. 26. Leith to Bathurst, Jan. 7, 1816, CO 152/106; Leith to Bathurst, July 28, 1815, CO 152/105. 27. On Montserrat, see Elliot to Badiurst,

Aug.

10,

1813,

CO 152/102;

Bathurst to Elliot (Secret and Confidential), Oct. 16, 1813, CO 153/34; on the Virgin Islands, “Leave of Absence Address of Free People of Colour to [Chief Justice] James Robertson, CO 152/104; Abraham Chalwill Hill to Bathurst, Feb. 16, 1815, CO 152/105; Leith to Bathurst, July 28, 1815, CO 152/105; on Barbados,

Handler,

Unappropriated People,

82-85.

Free coloreds in the

Danish West Indies also started petitioning for the removal of disabilities around 1816. On this subject, see N. A.T. Hah, “The 1816 Freedom Petition in the Danish Virgin Islands: Its Background and Consequences,” Paper pre¬ sented at the 11th Annual Conference of the Association of Caribbean Histo¬ rians, Curasao, April 5-10, 1979. 28. For the petitions, see CO 318/76. 29. See ch. 4 above. While the precise amount of free colored holdings is

NOTE S TO PA G E S 102-106

•

173

difficult to determine, contemporary accounts leave no doubt that it was substantial by the 1820s. 30. The final quotation is from the St. Kitts petition; the others are from the Grenada petition. 31. Memorial of St. Kitts’s Free Coloreds, CO 318/76. 32. Memorial of Grenada’s Free Coloreds, ibid. 33. The act that was disallowed was Act 186, Nov. 22, 1822, CO 103/11. For opinions and comments on it, see Thomas Luck to R.W. Horton, March 8, 1824, CO 101/64; “Extract from a Report of the Lords Committee for Trade on an Act Passed in Grenada in November,

1822,” ibid.

Rathurst to Officer

Commanding the Government of Grenada, May 6, 1824, CO 102/18; James Stephen, Jr., to [??], Sept. 19, 1823, CO 323/42. 34. Act 190, Dec. 19, 1823, CO 103/11. 35. James Stephen, Jr., to Earl of Rathurst, April 12, 1824, CO 323/42. 36. “Copy of 1st and 2nd Reports of a Committee of the House of Assembly on the Petition of the Coloured Inhabitants of St. Christopher,” Sept.

19,

1823, and Oct. 17, 1823, respectively, CO 318/76. See also Assembly, Min¬ utes, Sept. 26, 1823, and Oct. 17, 1823, CO 241/25. 37. “Extracts of Gov.

Maxwell s Address to Assembly and Council, and

their Reply,” Maxwell to Bathurst, Dec. 10, 1823, CO 239/9. 38. Maxwell to Bathurst, Jan. 10, 1825 (with enclosures), CO 239/12. 39. Act 208, Nov. 28, 1825, CO 240/16. 40. “Third Report of Commissioners,” 109; Assembly, Minutes, Aug. 17, 1827,

CO 104/12.

In Tortola,

for example, free coloreds were serving on

coroners’ juries because the whites did not wish to do so. 41. Act 235, Nov. 25, 1828, CO 103/12. 42. James Stephen, Jr., to Sir George Murray, Feb. 5, 1829, CO 323/46. Although the Council attempted to make the act applicable to all free col¬ oreds, the Assembly succeeded in limiting it to only those born free, Council, Minutes, Nov. 21, 1828, CO 104/10. 43. [Chief Justice John] Sanderson to Goderich, Jan. 5, 1833, and Feb. 2, 1833, CO 101/77. 44. Assembly, Minutes, July 17, 1828, and May 7, 1829, CO 241/26; Coun¬ cil, Minutes, July 3, 1828, CO 241/27. 45. Maxwell to Murray, Oct. 5, 1829, CO 241/26;

Nov.

PP,

5, 1829,

CO 239/20; Assembly,

Minutes,

XXV (1829), 201.

46. Maxwell to Murray, Aug. 29, 1829 (with enclosures), CO 239/20; Act. 234, Dec. 3, 1830, CO 240/17. 47. “Petition of St.

Kitts Free Coloreds to Secretary George Murray,”

Maxwell to Murray, Aug. 29, 1829, CO 239/20. 48. “Minutes of a Meeting between Governor Maxwell and A Deputation of Free Coloured Inhabitants,

July 14,

1830,” Ralph

B.

Cleghorn to Sir

George Murray, Sept. 21, 1830, CO 239/23. 49. Act 238, April 6, 1831, CO 240/17; “Proceedings of Court of King’s Bench and Common Pleas, 1820-1833, 50. Edward

Gibbs

St. Kitts Archives.

to Viscount Goderich,

March 28,

1831,

CO

101/71.

Although a number of whites charged that he had actively campaigned for office. Bent claimed that it was all the work of tree coloreds. The president

174

•

NOTES TO PAGES 106-12

actually suspended him from his post as chief justice despite the fact that he had not assumed his seat. 51. Ibid. 52. “Petition of Free Coloured Inhabitants of Grenada to the House of Commons,” Dec. 4, 1830 (Enclosure 2 in Gibbs to Goderich, March 28, 1831); “To the people of Great Britain, from the Free Coloured Inhabitants of Grenada,” Dec. 10, 1830 (Enclosure 3 in ibid.). 53. Gibbs to Goderich, March 28, 1831, CO 101771. 54. Cleghorn to Murray, Jan. 25, 1830, Feb. 26,1830, May 1,1830, May 5, 1830, Sept. 7, 1830, CO 239/23. Horace Twiss to Cleghorn, Dec. 19, 1829, Sept. 14, 1829, CO 407/2; Murray to Cleghorn, May 5, 1830, May 12, 1830, CO 407/2; Cleghorn to Zachary Macaulay (Private), June 29, 1833, and Macaulay to Dr. Stephen Lushington, Aug. 24 [1833], in Oliver, Caribbeana, VL141-44. 55. William Augustus Miles to Goderich, Feb. 21, 1831, CO 101771. 56. Act 269, Jan. 30, 1832, CO 103/13. 57. Assembly, Minutes, Sept. 13, 1832, CO 241728; Act 248, April 6, 1833, CO 240/17. 58. James Colquhoun to Sir George Murray, Jan. 25, 1830, CO 239/23. 59. James Stephen (the younger) to Joseph Marryatt [1833], CO 101777; Paul Knaplund, Jaines Stephen and the British Colonial System (Madison, 1953), 118. 60. Campbell to Goderich, April 18, 1832, June 7,1832, and Dec. 28, 1832, CO 101775; J. Stewart to Howick, July 4,1832, ibid.; Howickto Stewart, June 20, 1832, and Aug. 21, 1832, CO 102/19; Goderich to Campbell, July 10,1832, and Oct. 16, 1832, CO 102/20. Garraway later served as special justice in Carriacou for five months from Sept. 1835 to Jan. 1836. He was appointed special magistrate in Barbados in Sept. 1836 and continued to serve on that island as stipendiary magistrate at least until 1844. See Woodville K. Mar¬ shall, ed., The Colthurst Journal (Millwood, N.Y., 1977), 33, 240. 61. St. Georges Chronicle and Grenada Gazette, July 6, 1833. 62. Gov. Evan J.M. McGregor to Stanley, May 7, 1833, and May 21, 1833 (with enclosures), CO 239/33; James McQueen to John Lefevre (Private), Sept. 16, 1833, CO 239/35. 63. McGregor to Stanley, May 21, 1833, CO 239/33. 64. Antigua Weekly Register, June 4, 1833, as reprinted in St. George’s Chronicle and Grenada Gazette, June 29, 1833.

Chapter 7 1. Periodical Accounts Relating to the Missions of the Church of the United Brethren Established Among the Heathens, 13 vois. (London, 1790-18.34), I (1790):6. See also G.G. Oliver Maynard, A History of the Moravian Church, Eastern West Indies Province (Trinidad, 1968). 2. Periodical Accounts, 1:18—19; 11:83, 264; VI:434. For a useful modern treatment of the sociology of Moravian missionary activity in the Leeward Islands as a whole during this period, see Goveia, Slave Society, 270-84.

NOTES TO PAGES 112-21 3.

•

175

"Returns from the Moravian Church, 27th July, 1830,” CO 239/22- see

also PP, XLVII (1831-32), 91-105. 4. St. Christopher Advertiser and Weekly Intelligencer, Dec. 28, 1824, (clipping in CO 239/12). 5. An Account of the Rise, Progress, and Present State of the Methodist Missions, by the Rev. Dr. Coke, General Superintendent of these Missions (London, 1804), 4; A Journal of the Rev. Dr. Coke’s Third Tour Through the West Indies, in Two Letters to the Rev. ]. Wesley (London, 1791), 7. 6. Annual Report of the Spiritual and Financial State of the Missions

Carried on in the West Indies, Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, Ireland, and Wales, under the Direction of the Methodist Conference (London, 1816), 17. For the aims of the missionaries, see Statement of the Plan, Object, and Effects of the Wesleyan Missions in the West Indies (London, 1824). 7. See, on the matter of language problems in Grenada, Annual Report (1805), 5. The St. Kitts figures for 1830 are from the Annual Report for that year, 49. 8. Annual Report (1806), 14. 9. Annual Report (1826), 84. 10. Rev. Thomas Coke, A History of the West Indies, 3 vols. (1808; reprint ed., New York, 1971), IIL66. 11. Annual Report (1822), vii-xiii. 12. Ibid., xiii. 13.

"Returns by the Wesleyan Missionaries, July, 1830,” CO 239/22.

14. Annual Report (1823), 50. 15. Annual Report (1829), 47. 16. John A. Parker, A Church in the Sun (London, 1959), 21—22. 17. Lt. Gov. Charles Shipley to Earl of Bathurst, May 28,1815, CO 101/55; Lt. Gov. Phineas Riall to Bathurst, April 15, 1816, CO 101/56; James Stephen to John Lefevre, March 7, 1834, CO 101/78. 18. Raymond P. Devas, Conception Island (London, 1932), 240-45. CO 101/72 and 73 contain useful information on the furor created in Grenada by O Hannan’s position. 19.

“Petition of Rev. Anthony O’Hannan to Sec. George Murray, June 9,

1829,

CO 101/72; “Petition of His Majesty’s Coloured Roman Catholics,

Subjects of the Island of Grenada, to Sir George Murray, 1829,” CO 101/72; Hforace] T[wiss] to John Lefevre, March 27, 1834, CO 101/78. 20. On this matter, see Carl Campbell, “The Rebel Priest: Francis De Ridder and the Fight for Free Coloureds’ Rights in Trinidad, 1825-1832,” Paper presented at the 11th Annual Conference of Caribbean Historians, Curasao, April 5-10, 1979. O’Hannan to Murray, Sept. 29, 1829, CO 101/72; Alexis Joseph Gobert to Gov. James Campbell, Aug. 24, 1831, CO 101/73. 21. PP, XVII (1823), 74. 22. Rev. J. Barthum to Bishop of London, Jan. 14, 1820, uspg, Fulham Papers, vol. 3 (West Indies, pt. 2, 1810-26). 23. Rev. Barthum to Bishop of London, Jan. 19, 1822, ibid.; Barthum to John Delap Wilson, May 28, 1821 (enclosure in President Wilson to [?] June 5, 1821), CO 239/7. 24.

"Bishops

Primary Charge Delivered in Barbados, Antigua, and St.

176

•

NOTES TO PAGE S 123-32

Christopher, 1830 and 1831,” as quoted by F.P. Luiga Josa, English Church

History of the West Indian Province (Demerara, 1910), 37. 25. Pres. Samuel Dent to Lord Hobart, June 5, 1802, CO 101739. 26. A Letter to the Governors, Legislatures, and Proprietors of Plantations

in the British West Indian Islands (London, 1808). 27. “First Report of the Society for the Education of the Poor, 1825,

CO

101765. The second and eighth reports, for 1826 and 1832, are in CO 101766 and 75, respectively. The third, fourth, and fifth reports, for 1827, 1828, and 1829, respectively, are located in the British Museum. Unless stated other¬ wise, subsequent information dealing with the central schools and the society for those years has been culled from the report for that particular year. 28. “Report of the Roman Catholic Establishment in the Colony of Gre¬ nada’ (Enclosure 9 in Campbell to Murray, Dec. 1, 1828), CO 101768; “Ad¬ dress of Thanks from Catholics of Grenada, ” Campbell to Murray, July 22, 1831, CO 101/71; “Petition of Rev. O’Hannan to Secretary Murray, June 9, 1829,” CO 101/72; Blue Book, 1828, CO 106/22. 29. PP, XLVII (1831-32), 54-59. 30. Blue Book, 1833, CO 106/27. 31. “Memorial of the Governors of the Institution for the Support and Education of Poor and Destitute White Children in this Island,” Assembly, Minutes, May 4, 1827, CO 241726. “Eighth Report of the Branch Association of the Island of St. Christopher, for the Year Ending 31st August, 1833, ” CO 239/35. 32. “Report of the R.C. Establishment,

CO 101/68; Blue Book, 1828, CO

106/22; PP, XLVII (1831-32), 54-59. 33. “Eighth Report of the Branch Association,” CO 239/35. 34. Martin Carnoy, Education as Cultural Imperialism (New York, 1974),

8. 35. Robert Adam to Bishop of London, May 6,1823, USPG, Fulham Papers, vol. 2 (West Indies, pt.l, 1803-27). 36. First Report of the Society for the Education of the Poor (Grenada, 1825). For an elucidation of this system, see David Salmon, ed., The Practical

Parts of Lancaster s Improvement and Bell’s Experiment (Cambridge, 1932); Joseph Lancaster, Improvements in Education (London, 1808); Lancaster, The British System of Education (London, 1810); Joseph Fox, A Comparative View of the Plans of Education as Detailed in the Publications of Dr. Bell and Mr. Lancaster, 2nd ed. (London, 1809). 37. Third, Fourth, and Fifth Reports of the Society for the Education of the Poor, 1827-29. 38. Campbell to Goderich, April 6, 1833, CO 101776; John Hoyes to Goderich, Jan. 31, 1833, CO 101777.

Chapter 8 1. Evidence of Alexander Campbell, Feb. 17, 1790, in “Slave Trade: Min¬ utes of Evidence,

PP, XXIX (1790), 698. Sir Alexander Campbell had first

visited the West Indies in 1754 and resided for some time in Barbados, St.

NOTES TO PAGES 132-39

•

177

Kitts, and St. Eustatius. In 1759 he went as a merchant to Antigua, where he remained until 1762, when he moved to Martinique. One year later, he went to Grenada, which island alternated with England as his residence until 1788. Indeed, he claimed that between 1779 and 1788 he resided exclusively in Grenada. Sir Alexander owned extensive properties in all the ceded islands and admitted in 1790 that the number of slaves attached to his estates was about 1,000. 2. See, e.g., the essay by Leo Elisabeth, "The French Antilles,” and that by A.J.R. Russel-Wood, “Colonial Brazil,’

in Neither Slave nor Free, ed.

Cohen and Greene, 85-171. 3. Elisabeth, “The French Antilles,” 135. Russell-Wood, “Colonial Bra¬ zil,” 115. 4. Handler, Unappropriated People, 67—69. This matter is also discussed in Neither Slave nor Free ed. Cohen and Greene, 230—31. 5. Handler, Unappropriated People, 69. Campbell, Dt/namics of Change, by JeromeS. Handler and by Arnold A. Sio, “Barbados,

45. 6. Virgin Islands act of 1783: "An Act for the good Government of Negro and other Slaves, for preventing the Harbourage and Encouragement to Runaway Slaves, and for restraining and punishing all Persons who shall abet the pernicious Practices of trafficking with Slaves for any of the Staple or other commodities of those islands, ” PP, XXIV (1789), 634, pp. 66-78, clauses xxxii, xxxix. 7. Virgin Islands act of 1783: “An Act for the good Government of Negro and other Slaves,’ clauses xxxi, xxxvii. 8. Goveia, Slave Society, 183-84. 9. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, 3 vols. (London, 1774), 11:323. See also Campbell, Dynamics of Change, 48, which discusses this act and lays bare the philosophy behind Long’s defense of it. 10. Goveia, Slave Society, 182. 11. William A. Green, British Slave Emancipation (Oxford, 1976), 33.

A

General View of the Principles on which this System of Laws appears to have been originally founded . . . ,” PP, XXVI (1789), 646a, pt.3. 12. Long, History, 11:321. 13. Frederick P. Bowser, “Colonial Spanish America,” inNeither Slave nor

Free, ed. Cohen and Greene, 46. 14. Russell-Wood, “Colonial Brazil,” 113. 15. On this matter, see ch. 6. in Neither Slave nor Free, ed.

16. H. Hoetink, “Surinam and Curasao,

Cohen and Greene, 63. Russell-Wood, “Colonial Brazil,

84; Bowser,

Colo¬

nial Spanish America,” 23-33. 17. Handler, Unappropriated People, 210. 18. Hoetink, “Surinam and Curasao,” 62. 19. Long, History, IL329. 20. Elisabeth, Curapao,

“The French Antilles,’

159.

Hoetink,

63.

21. Campbell, Dynamics of Change, 43-44. 22. “Evidence of Sir Alexander Campbell,

Feb. 15, 1790.

Surinam and

178

•

NOTES TO PAGES 139-45

23. Elisabeth, “The French Antilles,” 165. Russell-Wood, ‘Colonial Bra¬ zil,” 107. 24. Elisabeth, “The French Antilles,” 165. 25. Evidence of Sir Ashton Warner Byam, Feb. 10, 1790 in

Slave Trade:

Minutes of Evidence, ” PP, XXIX (1790), 698. Sir Ashton had spent more than 20 years in different capacities in the Caribbean. Arriving at Antigua from England in 1765, he resided there until 1770, when he moved to St. Vincent. During his four-year stay on this island, he purchased an estate, which he later sold in 1788. In 1774, he moved to Grenada as solicitor general, which position he held until 1779. During the French possession of the island, he resided briefly in a number of other territories before returning to the island on its restoration to the British. In 1783 he was appointed attorney general, an office that he continued to hold even after his return to England in 1789. 26. Bishop W. H. Coleridge to Secretary of the uspg, Sept. 28, 1833, USPG, Fulham Papers, West Indies, as quoted by J. Harry Bennett, Bondsmen and

Bishops (Berkeley, 1958), 128. 27. “Evidence of Sir Alexander Campbell, Feb. 15, 1790. Handler, Unap¬ propriated People, 123, also mentions the prevalence of poor white beggars in the streets of Bridgetown during the early 19th century. The whole question of the plight of poor whites throughout the British Caribbean during the period of slavery deserves more attention than it has received so far from scholars. 28. Elisabeth, “The French Antilles,” 155. In the French islands free mulatto children were prohibited by law from taking the name of their father. 29. Hoetink, “Surinam and Curayao,” 78. 30. Evidence of J.W. Tobin, Feb. 25, 1790, in “Slave Trade: Minutes of Evidence,

PP, XXIX (1790), 698. “Evidence of James Baillie,” Feb. 19, 1790,

ibid. 31. Elisabeth, “The French Antilles,” 143. 32. The best single modern treatment on the growth of antislavery in the United States and Europe as a whole is Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher, eds., Anti-Slavery, Religion, and Reform (Hamden, Conn. 1980). 33. On the Haitian Revolution, James s classic Black Jacobins still remains indispensable reading. See also the other works cited in ch. 5, n. 1. 34. See ch. 5. 35. On the emergence of a number of laws barring free coloreds and slaves from entering the United States, see Berlin, Slaves without Masters, 35-36. 36. Stanley to Portland, May 27, 1795 (with enclosures), CO 152/77. 37. Stanley to Dundas, Nov’. 15, 1793, CO 152/74. 38. “Translation of the Confession of Morillon Desfosses,” [c. 1795], Fran¬ cis Russell Hart Collection, Massachusetts Historical Society'. I am thankful to Jerome S. Handler of the Univ. of Southern Illinois at Carbondale for drawing this document to my attention and for sharing it with me. 39. Stanley to Dundas, Sept. 7, 1793 (with enclosures), CO 152/74. 40. Jamaica act of Dec. 4, 1813: “An Act to enable Persons of Colour, and Negroes of Free Condition to serve deficiencies for their own slaves, and for the slaves of each other.” Jamaica act of Dec. 4,1813: “An Act to repeal several

NOTE S TO PAGE S 146-51

•

179

Acts, and the Clause of an Act of this Island, respecting Persons of free Condition, and for granting to such Persons Certain Privileges.” Bahamas act of Jan. 23, 1822: An Act to extend Certain Privileges of Persons of Free Condition within these Islands." Virgin Islands act of July 31, 1818: “An Act for meliorating the Condition of the Free Coloured and Free Black Inhabit¬ ants of these Islands. Printed copies of all the above-mentioned acts are contained in “Acts of the Colonial Legislatures, 1818-1823,” PP, XXIII (1824). The acts passed in Grenada and St. Kitts are discussed in ch. 6. On those passed in Barbados, see Handler, Unappropriated People, 82—109.

Chapter 9 1. Franklin W. Knight, Slave Society in Cuba, 194. Higman, “Slave Popu¬ lations,” 60-70. 2. Edward Brathwaite, Creole Society, 296. 3. Sio, "Race, Colour, and Miscegenation,” 17. 4. Andrew Irwin to Earl of Hillsborough, July 13,1772, CO 101/16; Melville to Shelbourne, Jan. 26, 1767, CO 101711; acts of April 28, 1767, and April 30, 1767, CO 103/1. “General Return of the Militia of Grenada for Sept. 1813, from the Field Returns of the Different Regiments,” in Shipley to Beckwith, Sept. 11, 1813, CO 101/53. 5. See act of Dec. 10, 1766, “An Act for the Better Government of Slaves and for the More Speedy and Effectual Suppression of Runaway Slaves,” CO 103/1. 6. Apart from the work of Sio mentioned in n. 3, see Samuel J. Hurwitz and Edith F. Hurwitz, “A Token of Freedom: Private Bill Legislation for Free Negroes in Eighteenth Century Jamaica,” William and Mary Quarterly 24 (1967):423—31; Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black (Chapel Hill, 1968), 177. 7. “Letter from Louis La Grenade to Assembly dated July 6, 1776,” in Assembly, Minutes, July 15, 1776, CO 104/4. 8. Assembly, Minutes, June 29, 1786, CO 104/6. 9. Act 234, Dec. 3, 1830, CO 240/17; Assembly, Minutes, July 17,1828, CO 241/16. This matter is discussed more fully in ch. 6. 10. “Memorial of H.M.’s Subjects of Colour of the Island of Grenada, to Henry Maddox and Fortunatus Dwarris Esqs., H.M.’s Commissioners of Inquiry into the Administration of Justice in the Colonies,” May 26,1823, CO 318/76. 11. On landholding and slaveholding in Grenada and St. Kitts, see ch. 4. Handler, Unappropriated People, 117-53, deals quite incisively with the general economic status of free coloreds in Barbados. In addition to Sio, “Race, Colour, and Miscegenation,” see Charles Wesley, "The Emancipa¬ tion of the Free Coloured Population in the British Empire, Journal of Negro History 24(1934), 137-70; Campbell, Dynamics of Change, 47—18, 55. 12. Campbell, Dynamics of Change, 66. 13. Grenada Free Press and Public Gazette, Nov. 29, 1831.

180

•

NOTES TO PAGES 151-56

14 On the complaints of St. Kitts whites, see Assembly, Minutes, Oct. 24, 1769, CO 241714; Act 4 of Sept. 25, 1762, CO 240/10. Campbell, Dynamics of Change, 62. 15. “The Humble Address of the Free Coloured Inhabitants of Grenada to Governor Matthew, Jan. 10, 1792, Matthew to Dundas, Jan. 10, 1792, CO 101732; “Petition of His Majesty’s Coloured Roman Catholics, Subjects of the Island of Grenada, to Sir George Murray [1829],” CO 101772. 16. Carmichael, Domestic Manners, 1:69. 17. For the dilemma facing these individuals of mixed racial ancestry, see Campbell, Dynamics of Change, 43. 18. Governor Evan J.M. McGregor to E.G.S. Stanley, May 7, 1833, and May 21, 1833, CO 239/33; James McQueen to John Lefevre (Private), Sept. 16, 1833, CO 239/35. 19. Carmichael, Domestic Manners, 1:71; Goveia, Slave Society, 215-1/; Ramsay, Essay, 83; Edwards, History of the British Colonies,

11.26.

Brathwaite, Creole Society, 188—89. 20. “Extract from Parish Register of St. George s of Island of Grenada, p. 1420, no. 12157,” Nov. 20, 1830, CO 101773; J.B. Gaff to Gov. James Campbell, Oct. 2,1830, CO 101772. Bent to Sir George Murray, July 31, 1830, CO 101772; “Register of St. George’s Parish, p. 289, no. 1617,” CO 101/72. 21. This certainly was the case with Gaff. See Gaff to Campbell, Oct. 2, 1830, CO 101/72. 22. Coleridge, Six Months, 97, 203. 23. Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen, 69. 24. Goveia, Slave Society, 308. 25. See Handler, Unappropriated People, 213-14, for a discussion of the Barbados situation. His “Joseph Rachell and Rachael Pringle-Polgreen: Petty' Entrepreneurs,” in Struggle and Survival in Colonial America, ed. David G. Sweet and Gary B. Nash (Berkeley, 1981), 376-91, also contains useful in¬ sights. 26. William Augustus Miles to Lord Goderich, Feb. 21, 1831, CO 101/71.

Bibliography

Manuscripts

PUBLIC RECORD OFFICE, LONDON CO 101/1—77. Original Correspondence of Executives of Grenada with Secre¬ tary of State, 1762-1833. CO 102/1—21. Entry Book of Commissions, Instructions, etc., re Grenada, 1763-1834. CO 103/1-13. Acts of Grenada Legislature, 1766-1834. CO 104/1-14. Sessional Papers of Grenada Legislature, 1766-1834. CO

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CHURCH AND MISSIONARY RECORDS

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Published Sources and Bibliographical Aids GOVERNMENT PUBLICATIONS

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Knight, E. Gittens. Grenada Handbook. Barbados, 1946. Knight, Franklin W. Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century. Madison, 1970. The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism. New York, 1978. Lancaster, Joseph. Improvements in Education. London, 1808.

-.

-. The British System of Education. London, 1810. Letters on the Necessity of a Prompt Extinction of British Colonial Slavery. London, 1826. Leyburn, James G. The Haitian People. New Haven, 1941.

Lockridge, Kenneth A. Literacy in Colonial New England: An Enquiry into the Social Context of Literacy in the Early Modern West. New York, 1974. Mahan, A.T. The Influence of Sea Power upon the French Revolution and Empire, 1793-1812. 2 vols. New York, 1968. Marshall, W. K. ‘Peasant Development in the West Indies since 1838.” Social and Economic Studies 17 (Sept. 1968): 253-63. Marshall, Woodville K., ed. The Colthurst Journal. Millwood, N.Y., 1977. Mathieson, William Law. British Slavery and Its Abolition, 1823-1838. New York, 1967. Maynard, G.G. Oliver. A History of the Moravian Church, Eastern West Indies Province. Trinidad, 1968. McCloy, Shelby T. The Negro in the French West Indies. Lexington, Ky., 1966" McDonnell, Alexander. The West India Legislatures Vindicated . . . Lon¬ don, 1826. Millette, James. The Genesis of Crown Colony Government: Trinidad 17831810. Trinidad, 1970. Mims, Stewart L. Colbert s West India Policy. New Haven, 1912. Mintz, Sidney W. Caribbean Transfonnations. Chicago, 1974. -. “Slavery and the Rise of Peasantries. Historical Reflections 6 (Summer, 1979): 213-42. Mullin, Gerald W. Flight and Rebellion: Slave Resistance in Eighteenth Cen¬ tury Virginia. Oxford, 1972. Murphy, J. The Religious Problem in English Education. Liverpool, 1959. Murray, D.J. The West indies and the Development of Colonial Government, 1801-1934. Oxford, 1965. Oliver, Vere Langford, ed. Caribbeana, Being Miscellaneous Papers Relat¬ ing to the History, Genealogy, Topography, and Antiquities of the British West Indies. 6 vols. London, 1902-19. -, ed. The Monumental Inscriptions of the British West Indies. Lon¬ don, 1927.

188

•

FREE COLOREDS OF ST. KITTS AND GRENADA

Ott, Thomas O. The Haitian Revolution, 1789—1804. Knoxville, 1973. Parker, John A. A Church in the Sun: The Story of the Rise of Methodism in the Island of Grenada , West Indies. London, 1959. Particidars Respecting the Schools for Negro Children etc., Under the Direc¬ tion of the Moravian Missionaries in the West Indies. London, 1827. Patterson, Orlando. The Sociology of Slavery. London, 1967. -. “Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Socio-Historical Analysis of the First Maroon War, 1655-1740.” Social and Economic Studies 19 (Sept. 1970): 289-325. Periodical Accounts Relating to the Missions of the Church of the United Brethren Established Among the Heathen. Vols. 1-12. London, 1790— 1831. Pitman, Frank W. The Development of the West Indies, 1700-1763. New Haven, 1917. Porteus, Beilby. A Letter to the Governors, Legislatures, and Proprietors of Plantations in the British West Indies, with Appendix. London, 1808. Proctor, Samuel, ed. Eighteenth-Century Florida and the Caribbean. Gainesville, Fla., 1976. Ragatz, Lowell J. Guide to the Official Correspondence of the Governors of the British West Indian Colonies with the Secretary of State, 1763-1833. London, 1923. Statistics for the Study of British Caribbean Economic History, 1763-1833. London, 1927.

-.

-. A Checklist of House of Commons Sessional Papers Relating to the British West Indies and to the West Indian Slave Trade and Slavery, 17631834. London, 1932. -. Guide for the Study of British Caribbean History, 1763-1834. Wash¬ ington, 1932. Ramsay, James. An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies. Dublin, 1784. Remarks upon the Evidence Given by Thomas Irving Esq. . . . London, 1791. Reports of the Committee of the Society for the Mitigation and Gradual Abolitio7i of Slavery Throughout the British Dominions. Second Report: 1825. Third Report: 1826. London. A Safe and Practical Course in the West India Question. London, 1833. Sainsbury, W. Noel, ed. Calender of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and the West Indies, 1661-1737. London, 1860-1926. Salmon, David, ed. The Practical Parts of Lancasters Improvements and Bell’s Experiment. Cambridge, 1932. Schuyler, Robert Livingston. “The Constitutional Claims of the British West Indies.’ Political Science Quarterly 40 (1925): 1—36. -. Parliament and the British Empire. New York, 1929. Sheridan, Richard B. An Era of West Indian Prosperity. Barbados, 1970. The Development of the Plantations to 1750. Barbados, 1970. Sugar and Slavery: An Economic History of the British West Indies, 1623—1775. Baltimore, 1.974.

-. -.

Sio, Arnold. Race, Colour, and Miscegenation: The Free Coloured of Jamaica and Barbados.” Caribbean Studies 16 (April 1976): 5-21.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

•

189

The Slave Colonies of Great Britain; or, A Picture of Slavery Drawn by the Colonists Themselves. London, 1825. Smith, Gavin. Reference to the Plan of the Island of Grenada, August 1824. London, 1882. Smith, George. Laws of Grenada, from 1763 to 1805 . . . London, 1808. Spence, William. The Radical Cause. London, 1807. Statement of the Plan, Object, and Effects of the Wesleyan Missions in the West Indies. London, 1824. Stephen, James. The Crisis of the Sugar Colonies. London, 1802. -. England Enslaved by Her Own Slave Colonies. London, 1828. -. The Slavery of the British West India Colonies Delineated. 2 vols.

London, 1824r-30. Tannenbaum, Frank. Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas. New York, 1947. Thompson, H P. Into All Hands: The History of the Society for the Propaga¬ tion of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, 1701-1950. London, 1951. Turnbull, Gordon. A Narrative of the Revolt and Insurrection of the French Inhabitants in the Island of Grenada. London, 1795. Tyson, George F., Jr. Toussaint L’Ouverture. Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1973. Wells, Septimus. Historical and Descriptive Sketch of the Island of Grenada. London, 1890. Wesley, Charles H. “The Neglected Period of Emancipation in Great Bri¬ tain, 1807-1823. Journal of Negro History 17 (April 1932): 156-179. -. “The Emancipation of the Free Coloured Population in the British Empire.’ Journal of Negro History 24 (1934): 137-70. The West Indian Reporter. 1827—31. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill, 1944. Wikramanayake, Marina. A World in Shadow: The Free Black in Antebellum South Carolina. Columbia, 1973. Winn, T. S. Emancipation; or, Practical Advice to British Slaveholders. Lon¬ don, 1824. Wise, Thomas Turner. A Review of Events Which Have Happened in Gre¬ nada . . . Grenada, 1795. Wood, Peter H. Black Majority: Negroes in Colonial South Carolina from 1670 through the Stono Rebellion. New York, 1974.

Newspapers At the Grenada Public Library, I have randomly searched faded and brittle copies of the Grenada Free Press and Weekly Gazette, and the St. Georges Chronicle and Grenada Gazette from 1826 and 1820, respectively, to 1833. At the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass., I also went through runs of the St. Christopher Chronicle for 1775 and 1800 and the St. Christopher Advertiser and Weekly Intelligencer for 1824—29.

Index Abercromby, Sir Ralph, Lieutenant General, 79, 87 abolitionists, 99-100 absenteeism, 17, 80 African religions, 131 Age of Revolution, 145 Ainslee, Lieutenant Governor George, 96, 98 Alexander, Javotte family of, 166 n.26 Allicock, Elizabeth, 57 American Revolution, 6, 149 Anderson estate, 128 Anglican Church, 111 racism in, 121-22 Anglican priests shortage of, 122 Anglicans, 111, 128 complaints of, 120 growth of, 119-20 lack of appeal to blacks, 122 Antigua’s Weekly Register, 69 antislavery, 123, 142, 150 promoted, 118 Anti-Slavery Society, 9, 107 Articles of Capitulation, St. Kitts, 15 Asia as source of migrant laborers, 21 Assembly, membership denied free coloreds, 106

Assembly, membership (Cont.) granted free coloreds, 107 property qualifications increased, 108 Assembly, Jamaican, 150 assimilation promoted by free coloreds, 83-84 Audain, Mrs., 36 Augustine (slave), 34-35 Austin, J., 171 n.26 Baillie, James, 141-42 baptisms by Moravians, 112 Barthum, Rev. Joseph, 121 Bathurst, earl of, 8, 54, 98-103 Begg. Thomas, 124 Belisario, A.M., 52 Bell, Dr. Andrew, 123, 129 Belvidere estate, 76, 87, 168 n.6 Bent, Chief Justice Jeffrev Hart, 106, 109, 154 Berkeley, Emely, 36 Berkeley, John, 74, 109-110 Berkeley, Susannah frees slaves, 36 Berlin, Ira, xi Besson, Stanislaus, 87 bishop of London, 121

Cumulate: Version J1 developed by The Papers of Henry Laurens. System design by David R Chesnutt, programmed by Steven W. Snipes and Jean W. Mustain.

190

INDEX bishoprics in Caribbean, 122 black troops whipped, 97

Clearkly, Joseph, 171 n.26 as landholder, 60 as merchant, 68

Blake, Francis, 74

Cleghorn, Robert, 68 Clozier, Narcis

Boucher, Janies, 154 Bousier, Finistere, 73 Bousier, Jean Marie, 73

frees slaves, 36-37 cocoa cultivated by free coloreds, 64 Code Noir, 142

Bousier, Robert, 73

Codrington estate, 140

Brathwaite, Edward, 147, 154

coffee

Brimstone Hall, 85 Buckley, Roger, 86 Bulam fever, 79, 170 n.12 Bunkershill estate, 61 burial places on St. Kitts, 95

191

Cleghorn, Ralph B., 74, 107, 109-110

Board ol Society of Surinam, 141 Board of Trade, 135

•

cultivated by free coloreds, 64 Cohen, David W., xi Coleridge, Henry Nelson, 23-25, 154 Coleridge, Bishop William Hart, 122, 140 color divisions among free coloreds, 137-38, 152

Burt, Edward, 72

Commissiong, Joseph Thomas, 109

Byam, Sir Ashton Warner, 140, 179 n.25

Commissions of Inquiry, 8, 101

Cable, Samuel, 112

Committee of Safety, 144

Calhoun, Joseph, 171 n.26

Comprehensive Slave Acts, 5

Campbell, Sir Alexander, 132, 139-40, 177 n.l

corporal punishment

Campbell, Donald, 73

Corps of Loyal Black Rangers, 79 cotton

recommendations, 104

Campbell, Isabella, 73 Campbell, Governor James, 25, 109

for free coloreds and slaves, 94

cultivated by free coloreds, 64

Campbell, Mavis C., xi, 150, 153

Court of King’s Bench, 106

Campbell, Susannah, 73

Couston, Mr., 34

Camp Fedon, 79

creolization, 25, 148

Carmichael, Mrs. A.C., 44, 152

Crooke, Margaret, 36

ceded islands, 4, 17

“Crown” Slaves, 50, 165 n.24

migration to, 4 Cedulas de gracias al sacar, 135

Cumba, or Mary (free black), 67 Customs Office, 109

census returns mechanism for, 10-12 reliability of, 11-12 central schools, 124, 129 enrollment, 125

Davis, David Brion, xi Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen, 77 Declaratory Act, 9

Chacon, Don Jose Maria, 78

de Cotte, Jean Francois, 144-45

Challenger, Richard, 73

deficiency laws, 16

Chelsea, 137

deficiency taxes, 102 exemption for free coloreds, 136

Christian missionaries, 121 achievements, 130 churches on St. Kitts, 95 Civil Code, 142 civil rights free coloreds granted, 105 Civil War, United States, 145-46 Clarkson, Thomas, 6 class distinctions among free coloreds, 104-105

Degler, Carl N., xi Demerara white migration to, 18 Desbordes, J.M., 60 Desfosses, Morillon, 144-45 disabilities removed from free coloreds, 145-46 discriminat ion against free coloreds, 156 Dundas, Henry, 83

192

•

FREE COLORE DS OF ST

Eaton, 137 Edmeade, Jedekiah Kerie, 72-73 education as socialization process, 137

KITTS AND GRENADA free coloreds (Cont.) definition of, 159 n.6 denied Assembly membership, 106 disabilities removed, 145

curriculum, 129-30

discrimination against, 156

official attitudes toward, 138

elite, 75 excluded from juries, 93 granted Assembly membership, 108

philosophy, 129 Edwards, Bryan planter-historian, 23-25

group solidarity, 99-104, 144, 150

Election Act, 92, 108

in governmental posts, 109-110

Elisabeth, Leo, 133, 139

in internal marketing system, 66-67

Ellice (slave), 36-37

in militia, 86, 148

emancipation, 130 Emancipation Act, 118

in New World, 132

Eustache, Mr., 34 evangelism, radical, 142

marriages, 25, 112, 120-21

international contacts, 144 mating patterns, 153 militancy among, 108

family slave, 160 n.12, 165 n.19 ties between slaves and free coloreds,

numbers of, 15 on Grenada, 148, 152 opposition to slave revolts, 102

75 Fedon, Jean, 61, 64, 87

petitions by individuals, 96

Fedon, Julien, 14, 61, 64, 81, 86—88, 118

publicly whipped, 96 regarded as runaways, 57, 94, 167

as revolutionary, 76-81

population growth, 19

causes, 80-87

n.47 request jury service, 102

results, 88-90

request voting rights, 101

Fedon’s rebellion, 4, 144, 152

Fifty-sixty Regiment, 86

residential patterns, 32

Forster, Robert, 80

sexual ratio, 23

Fort George, 85, 86

studies on, xi-xii

franchise granted to free coloreds, 103-104

wishing to be slaves, 140

Franklin, Joseph case of, 98-100 free coloreds

foreign deported from St. Kitts, 83 loyalty' questioned, 82-84 on Grenada

as artisans, 68-71

accepted as witnesses, 103

as farmers, 64

as agricultural workers, 29

as insurrectionists, 89

as jurors, 104

as landholders, 64

as landholders, 60-61

as merchants, 67-68

as owners of town lots, 59

as Methodist missionaries, 113

as propertyholders, 101

as shopkeepers, 67

as urban workers, 29

as slaveholders, 64, 73-74

divisions, 152

as small traders, 65 .

granted franchise, 103

as sugar producers, 62

group petitions, 101

attitude toward slavery, 151

petitions to British Parliament, 106-

attitude toward work, 139

107

aversion to field work, 69

on Jamaica

baptisms, 112

considered legally white, 135

birth rate, 21

inheritances restricted, 134-135

classified with slaves, 94

on St. Kitts

color distinctions, 137-38, 153

as jurors, 105

death rate, 21

granted franchise, 104

INDEX

free coloreds (Cont.) opposition to slavery, 107 sexual composition ol those Ireed, 36 French

•

193

Hermitage estate, 142 Hester (free colored), 57 lleuman, Gad J., xi Higman, Barry, xii, 18, 147

attacks on British possessions, 38

Holy Eucharist, 122

naval activity in Caribbean, 86-87

Home, Lieutenant Governor Ninian,

French National Assembly, 143 French National Convention, 77 French Revolution, 76, 82, 84, 88, 100,

76-78, 84, 86 Honduras convicts shipped to, 80, 89

143

Houston, Andrew, 21, 154

effects on Caribbean, 77, 81

Houston, Jane, 154 Houston, Margaret, 154

Gaff, James Briscoe, 154

Hugues, Victor, 77, 85, 143

Garraway, Joseph, 109, 175 n.60 General Assembly, of Leeward Islands, 52 Georges, W.P., 17 Gibbs, Edward, 107 Goderich, Viscount, 8, 107

Inheritance Act, 135 inheritances Jamaican restrictions on free coloreds, 134-35

Goveia, Elsa V., xi, 134, 155

Inspection Committee, Grenada, 130

government planter control of, 3-5

Islop, Rosette, 74

Governors, Lieutenant Governors and

Jamaican Assembly, 150

Governors General

Jordan, Winthrop D., 149

Ainslee, 96-98

Jovanneau, Barbe, 59

Campbell, 25, 109

juries, 93

Green, 89

jurors

Home, 76-78, 84, 86

on Grenada, 104

Leith, 57, 99

on St. Kitts

Matthew, 69, 81, 83, 152

free coloreds, 105

Maxwell, 103, 105-106

qualifications, 106

McCartney, 17 McGregor, 109 Melville, 4, 34-35, 82

jury service granted to free coloreds, 104-105 requested by free coloreds, 102

Shipley, 17, 21, 98, 100 Smith, 109, 118

Kennedy, Evan, 154

Woodley, 65, 83

Ker, Mr., 170 n.10

Great Britain as source of education, 130 Green, Anne, 71 Green, Governor Charles, 89

Klein, Herbert S., xi Knight, Franklin W., xi, 147 La Barrie, Victor, 61, 64

Greene, Jack P., xi, 80 Grenada Benevolent Society, 124

La Grenade, Louis, Jr., 109

Grey, Gen. Charles, 171 n.32

La Grenade, Louis, Sr., 62, 83, 149,

Guardian of Slaves, 51, 53 Guinards plantation, 61

as landholder, 61 152, 155 as an assimilationist, 84 as landholder, 61

Haitian Revolution, 56, 76, 84, 86, 88,

as military commander, 86

100, 143 Hall, Gwendolyn M., xi

as petitioner, 96 frees slaves, 36-37

Handler, Jerome S., xi, xii, 100, 133

Lancaster, Joseph, 129

Harvey, John, 16

landholding by free coloreds, 60-62

Hay, Dr. John, 170 n. 10

194

•

FREE COLOREDS OF ST. KITTS AND GRENADA

L’autriment (slave), 34

Martin, C., 171 n.26

La Valette, Jean Pierre, 87 lawyers, 93

Martinique free colored migration from, 19

legal system discrimination in, 93

mating patterns, 153 Matthew, Governor Edward, 69, 81, 83,

Leith, Governor James, 57, 99

152 Maxwell, Governor Charles, 58, 103,

Liverpool, earl of, 98 Long, Edward, 137 Loving, Henry, 69 Lynch, Nicholas J., 74

105-106 Melville, Governor Robert, 4, 82 actions questioned, 34-35 mercantile activity

McCartney, Governor George, 17 McEwen, Miss, 57

by free coloreds, 67 Methodists, 111-12, 128 attacked on Barbados, 113

McFarlane, Nancy, 74 McFarlane and Munro, merchant

communicants, 116

house, 62 McGregor, Governor Evan, 109

goals, 115 impact on free coloreds, 116

McIntosh, John, 173 n.14

instructions to, 115

McKenzie, Kenneth Francis, 77-79

intolerance of, 116 numerical growth, 113

McMahon, Rev. Francis, 170 n.10 McMahon, Terence, 73

supported status quo, 113

Mannings estate, 128

Michel, John case of, 96-100

manumissions, 19

migration

McMillan, Donald, 61

attempts to control, 21

whites

by color, 47-49

from St. Kitts, 13

by legislative acts, 33-35

to Grenada, 13 to Trinidad and Demerara, 16

by purchase, 35-38 by wills, 35-41

Miles, William Augustus, 107-108, 156

children, 39-40, 44-45

military

compulsory, 54-55

purpose in West Indies, 84-85

ease of, 154

strengdi of

facilitated, 54 fees on, 51-54 increase in, 38 infirm slaves, 47 of “Crown” slaves, 50

in Grenada, 86 militia on Grenada, 85-86, 148 ethnic divisions, 86, 171 n.20 Mintz, Sidney, 66

proving of, 56-58

miscegenation, 148

regulation of, 51-58

missionary activity

removal of monetary constraints, 53

promoting gradual change, 155 Moive (slave), 36-37

sexual breakdown, 39-41

Moody, Thomas, 99

without monetary payment, 40-41

Moravians, 111-12

on Grenada

Morgan, Rev. Thomas, 69

by age, 47 by parish, 41-44

Morne Jaloux estate, 61-62

restraints on, 38

mulattoes, 155

maroon wars, 29, 143, 148

Mt. Desir estate, 61 Mullin, Gerald W., xi

marriages by Moravians, 112

Nancy (slave), 36

free coloreds, 120-21

naval forces, French, 86-87

interracial, 141, 154

Nicholls, Colonel Oliver, 79

slaves, 121

Nicholson, Marie, 74

slaves and free coloreds, 141-42

Nogues, Charles, 77, 87

INDEX Occo, Betty, 140

Population Acts, 90, 102

O'Hannan, Rev. Anthony, 117, 125, 130, 152, 154

Porteus, Bishop Beilby, 123

as socio-political critic, 117-18 Old Road, 98 Osborn, Edward, 72, 74 Ottley, Mary, 74 Painter, Sam, 113, 116 Palmer, Felix, 96, 173 n.20 Paponet, Janet, 60 parochial schools, 123 Patterson, Orlando, xi, 80 paupers, 71

•

195

Priddie, William, 96 as businessman, 68 Prince William Henry, 67 Pringle, Thomas, 8 private bill legislation, 149 private bills on St. Kitts, 105 property holding on Grenada by free coloreds, 101 protectionism effects on Grenada, 3

peasants, 66 Peggy (slave), 36-37

Queely, John, 73

petitions by individuals, 96

race relations

to British Parliament, 106

Grenada and St. Kitts compared, 109-110 racism, 133-34

by free coloreds on Barbados, 100 on Grenada and St. Kitts, 97, 101-110 on Montserrat, 100 on Virgin Islands, 100 by groups absence of, 96 philanthropy, 124

attacked by Anglican church, 122 Ramsay, James, 6 Rawlins, Rev. Henry, 7 Rawlins, Dr. John, 99 Rawlins, Stedman, 99 Reeves, John, 135

Philip, Joachim, 76-77, 87

Registrar of Deeds, 58

Phillips, Honore

religions

family as landholders, 61 Phipps, Frances, 74 Pickwood, R.W., 98-99 plantation schools, 127-28 plantations

Afro-Caribbean, 116 of free coloreds, 116 religious instruction, 128 motives for, 6 Richmond Hill, 86

capital requirements, 62

Robertson, Francis Alexander, 70

destruction of, 88

Roman Catholics, 111, 125

on Grenada, 4 planters loss of political power, 143, 156, 160 n.9

attacked in Grenada, 117 discrimination against, 4-5, 80-81 numbers of, 117 Royal College of Physicians, 21

opposition to compulsory manumis¬

Rugendas, Joao Mauricio, 135

sion, 55

runaway slaves, 94, 148-49

Police Act, 94

Russell-Wood, A.J.R., 133, 135

political disputes on Grenada, 4-5, 81 Pompey (slave), 34 population geographic distribution, 26-29 Grenada and St. Kitts compared, 12-17

sailors interaction with free coloreds, 94 St. Bernard, Jean Baptiste, 61 St. Dominigue. See Haitian Revolution St. George’s Methodist Society, 116 St. George’s Regiment, 85-86

growth in Grenada, 4

St. Kitts Branch Association, 128

growth in St. Kitts, 3

“Saints,” 6-7

on Grenada

Sam (slave), 36 Sanderson, Chief Justice John, 104

ethnic divisions, 81-82

196

•

FREE COLOREDS OF ST. KITTS AND GRENADA

Saulger, Jn. Pre., 171 n.26 schools central, 124-25 for whites, 127

slaves (Cont.) numbers of, 15 owned by free coloreds, 73-74 participating in rebellion, 78

growth of, 69-70

purchased by free coloreds, 74

parochial, 127 plantation, 127-28

refusing freedom, 47

private, 127 rationale for, 123 Sunday, 128 church enrollment, 125 on St. Kitts public, 95

runaways, 148-49 urban, 73 Smith, Governor General Sir Lionel, 109, 118 social revolution delayed on St. Kitts, 105—106 Societe des Amis des Noirs, 144 Society for the Education of the Poor,

Seamen’s Acts, 144 Select Committee of Parliament, 135,

Grenada, 124 Society for the Promotion of Christian

140, 141 Sharp, Samuel, 131

soil exhaustion

Sheridan, Richard, 62 Shipley, Governor Charles, 19, 21, 98,

Stanley, E.G.S., 108

100 shopkeeping by free coloreds, 67

Knowledge, 129 on St. Kitts, 3 Stanley, John, 83, 144 Stephen, James, Jr., 8-9, 50, 99, 103, 108

Simmons, Dutchess, 116

Stephen, James, Sr., 8

Sio, Arnold, 148, 149

Stephen, John, 99

slave laws, West Indian, 135

Stewart, Mrs. Sophia, 37

slave registers, 73 Slave Registry Acts, 5-8, 11, 12, 94

sugar cultivated by free coloreds, 62-63

effect on manumissions, 37 slave revolts causes, 80 opposed by free coloreds, 102

revolution, 3-4, 147 sugar colonies decline of, 9 Sunday Schools, 128

slave trade investigations into, 140

Susannah (slave), 36

Slave Trade Abolition Act, 5-8, 53

Tampoon, Marie Francoise, 59

slavery

Tannenbaum, Frank, xi, 154

amelioration of, 51

Tapshire, Alfred, 74

attacks on, 6

Tapshire, Anthony, 73

Slavery Abolition Rill, 9

Thompson, Attorney General Charles,

slaves actions of runaways, 35

109 Tobin, James W., 21, 141

as wage earners, 73

Townsend, Philip, 67

attachment to plantations, 164 n.40

trade local, 65

baptism of, 112 birth rate, 7, 18-19, 161 n.16, 163 n.25 classified with free coloreds, 94 color of, 47, 165 n.23

Treaty of Paris, 4 Trinidad white migration to, 18

“Crown”, 50, 165 n.24

Turnbull, Horatio, 70

death rate, 7, 19

Turner, Nat, 131

family, 160 n.12, 165 n.19

Tyson, Clarison, 67

family ties, 45-47 ill treatment of, 7 in military, 79, 89 marriages, 25, 112, 115, 121

urban centers free coloreds in, 29 U trecht. Treaty of, 3

INDEX Vagabond Act, 89, 98 Ventour, Etienne, 76

divisions among, 17 illiterate, 93

Vesey, Denmark, 131

landless, 75

Villaret-Joyeuse, 138

low birth rates, 17

Vincent (slave), 34

mortality among, 21, 163 n.31

Virgin Islands

numbers of, 13-14

voting rights requested by free coloreds, 101

197

whites (Cont.)

Verchild’s estate, 99

restrictions on free coloreds, 134

•

sexual liaisons, 23 sexual ratio, 23, 163 n.24 shortage of, 16-17 landless

wages, 70-71

on Barbados and St. Kitts, 151

Wattley, George, 74

Wilson, Miss Betsey, 36, 37, 74

Waugh, Mr., 172 n.20

Wilson, John, 36

wealth

Wood, Peter H., xi Woodley, Governor William, 65, 83

distribution of, 71-72 West India lobby, 5, 9 Westminster, 137

Yamba, or Thomas (free black), 71

whites

Young, Sir William, 85

as beggars, 140, 179 n.27

Free Coloreds in the Slave Societies of St. Kitts and Grenada, 1< 63 1833 was composed into type on the Mergenthaler Variable Input Phototypesetter in ten point Caledonia with one point of spacing between the lines. Fritz Quadrata was selected for display. The book was designed by Jim Billingsley, typeset by Computer Composition, Inc., printed offset by Thomson-Shore, Inc., and bound by John H. Dekker & Sons. The paper on which the book is printed is designed for an effective life of at least three hundred years. The University of Tennessee Press : Knoxville

'■

Grenada’s free coloreds differed from those of St. Kitts in their French ancestry; both actual and proportional population size; and available economic opportunities. The Grenadians enjoyed the advantage, but they were nevertheless readier to translate contemporary French revolu¬ tionary ideology into Caribbean terms. Thus, in 1795, Grenada’s free coloreds un¬ successfully attempted by violent means to improve their situation. Solidarity and political astuteness increased among free coloreds of the two islands and others throughout the Caribbean in the early 1800s. The Author Edward L. Cox, who was born in Grenada, is associate professor of history at the University of South Carolina.

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