Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation
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Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822375050 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/19/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Troubling Freedom
Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation
By Natasha Lightfoot
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2015 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-7505-0
CHAPTER 1
"A LANDSCAPE THAT CONTINUALLY RECURRED IN PASSING"
The Many Worlds of a Small Place
It is just a little island. The unreal way in which it is beautiful now is the unreal way in which it was always beautiful. The unreal way in which it was beautiful now that they are a free people is the unreal way in which it was beautiful when they were slaves. — Jamaica Kincaid, A Small Place
As Jamaica Kincaid's famous essay on postcolonial Antigua suggests, there is a haunting connection between the island's beauty and its long history of exploitation, from the beginning of slavery to the present moment. Many elements composing Antigua's beauty — including its fertile soils, its flat and easily traversed landscape, its ease of access to the sea, and its constant, if not searing, stretches of uninterrupted sunshine — laid the groundwork for colonial settlement, an all-consuming staple-crop industry, and African enslavement. This island, tucked in the northeastern corner of the Caribbean Sea, can easily blend into the narrative of Britain's centuries-long imperial ventures around the globe. It is an especially diminutive place among the many "repeating islands" that punctuate modern Caribbean history and culture. But Antigua, while seemingly insignificant to the British Empire, contributed an overwhelming share of its human and natural resources to the making of an Anglo-Atlantic world. Its complex social relations and conflicts shaped many distinct ways of life within its small compass. Like slave societies throughout the Americas, Antigua's history features constant struggles among captive Africans and enterprising Europeans to build divergent social and economic structures from the grist of cane stalks and violence.
Antigua both reinforces and diverges from our understanding of a typical Caribbean slave society. Its small size and economic peripherality distinguish it from better-known places and underline the multiple conflicts that unfolded during the island's transition to freedom. The demographic imbalance that characterized Caribbean slave societies, in which a small number of whites were overwhelmed by a larger number of African slaves and their descendants, was especially severe in Antigua. The social and political power of whites still determined the order of life. But the steadily declining numbers of white residents in Antigua over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, combined with the lack of financial resources for effective public policing, made the surveillance of slave populations an increasingly scattered and piecemeal effort.
Consequently, Antiguan enslaved people moved around the island under slightly less duress than their counterparts elsewhere. Slaves around the Caribbean traveled frequently between town and country. For huckstering, mingling, or a host of other reasons, Afro-Caribbean slaves regularly sidestepped the legal prohibitions and patrols that policed their mobility. By 1800 Antigua could not even muster similar shows of force, however disregarded they were elsewhere. The large militias and corps of slave catchers that pursued runaways and regulated slave assemblies in such places as Jamaica, Barbados, and Saint-Domingue did not exist in Antigua. These forces, which were cobbled together from poor white, mixed-race, or maroon populations, were impossible to assemble in a place with so few whites, no maroons, and a mixed-race population that whites endeavored to render powerless. The island's local courts and slave owners severely punished the runaways they caught, as they did slaves who committed more flagrant violations against white persons and property. But Antigua's resident whites expressed constant concerns about keeping "order" that colonial officials left unheeded, as slave collectivities in public spaces became raucous and occasionally violent.
In the end, white elites, cognizant of their own inability to regulate slaves' activities beyond work, tacitly accepted the everyday transgressions slaves regularly committed in their socializing about the town and frequent movement between town and countryside. Their tolerance functioned as a safety valve to prevent the disastrous consequences of slave uprisings, which rarely occurred in Antigua, especially from the latter half of the eighteenth century onward. Some instances of slave assaults on whites and a single unsuccessful slave plot to overthrow white rule unfolded in the early 1700s, when sugar was at its most profitable and the white population — and thus the brute force it wielded — was at its height. But by 1790, the ratio of whites to blacks in Antigua was 1:18, versus 1:16 in Saint Domingue, 1:10 in Jamaica, and 1:4 in Barbados. At the turn of the nineteenth century, as the numbers of whites, the revenues from sugar, and the surveillance apparatus all receded, the remaining whites relaxed regulations on slave behavior and mobility. Only in 1831, when whites attempted to forcibly curtail the Sunday market, the greatest of slaves' quotidian "freedoms," did the slaves respond with mass public protests. This moment prompted authorities to swiftly contain the outburst and mete out punitive measures to a few unfortunate suspects.
The issues of slave mobility and lack of white oversight overlapped with another major attribute of early nineteenth-century Antigua: the blurred lines between the principal town, St. John's, and the surrounding countryside. In part this resulted from the physical closeness of the town to most of the sugar estates on an island only fourteen miles long and eleven miles wide (see figure 1.1). Slaves constantly traveled between town and country; rural slaves had many reasons to assume the legitimacy of their presence in many town spaces, and could have easily carried information between the two locales. As Melanie Newton says of Barbados, a somewhat larger island, proximity "brought the socioeconomic dynamics of plantations into towns, and simultaneously, brought the towns to the countryside." This overlap between town and country also resulted from the colony's disinterest in making St. John's an impressive or exclusive metropolitan space. Many contemporary accounts from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries describe the town's best buildings as visibly worn. Observers remarked that slaves moved about and congregated freely in the streets. While St. John's had many features that signified the power of colonialism and white authorities, these were surrounded by shabbiness and punctuated by the constant presence of slaves not only at work but also at play.
Whites in Antigua accommodated the everyday subversions of slaves, but the asymmetrical power relations of a slave society nonetheless meant that clear distinctions existed between trivial and serious transgressions. Slaves who ventured in excess of these quotidian allowances risked-corporal punishment, imprisonment, or even death. The mundane transactions that provided slaves with small liberties carried with them the constant threat of violence, forcing slaves to maintain a precarious balance between self-interest and deference to the prerogatives of whites. Enslaved people's daily freedoms and the public spaces that formed the setting for those activities to unfold both challenged and reinforced their degraded status as chattel.
Development and Instability in the Making of Colonial Antigua
Violence has marked Antigua's historical trajectory ever since the first clashes between Amerindians and Europeans in the Caribbean. The Spanish claimed Antigua and the nearby island of Barbuda in 1493 but mostly neglected them, given their lack of mineral deposits. Indigenous Caribs from surrounding islands sailed to Antigua and Barbuda to forage and farm, as they had done for centuries, without much interference. But the English sought control of Antigua in 1632, and a group of English colonists from St. Kitts established new plantations there. In response to these new arrivals, who had no intention of abandoning the land as the Spaniards had previously done, the Caribs launched bloody raids that disrupted the nascent English colony. The English eventually defeated and decimated the Caribs, establishing stable settlements in both Antigua and Barbuda by the 1670s. Whites quickly carved Antigua up into plantations, and sugar soon became the king of commercial agriculture on the island and across the region. By 1734, cane planting absorbed about 50,000 of the island's 72,000 acres. Christopher Codrington, one of Antigua's first and most successful planters, took possession of Barbuda, whose soil could not support cane planting, and used the produce from the island's small farming, fishing, and livestock industries to supply his Antiguan estates.
In the 1660s and 1670s, Antigua's sugar output expanded significantly, so that by the early eighteenth century, it exceeded that of most other Leeward Islands. In 1763 Antigua was the fourth-largest producer of sugar in the region, after Jamaica, Barbados, and St. Kitts. Sugar not only turned unprecedented profits but also sparked a drastic transformation. A few hundred white indentured servants from England, Scotland, and Ireland formed the first plantation labor force. By 1700, captive Africans overwhelmingly outnumbered white laborers, as indentured servants increasingly began to survive their contracts and become free, and at the same time the transatlantic slave trade began to reap remarkable profits for European empires.
At first, the overwhelming majority of slaves were African born. Despite planters' preference for Gold Coast "Coromantees" and Dahomean "Papas" and British control of slaving in both regions in the early 1700s, enslaved Antiguans came from various places on the continent. Ship registers show slavers with captives hailing from ports such as Calabar in the Bight of Biafra and from the Kongo Kingdom and Portuguese Angola in the western regions of central Africa, despite their lesser value in the British market and their reputedly higher death rates during the seasoning process in the Caribbean. The rising demand for estate labor stimulated a marked surge in the island's black population, augmented by newly arriving African captives.
Locally born slaves increased in number over the eighteenth century, but the fertility of the enslaved population was exceeded by the high mortality of infants because of the harrowing labor conditions endured by enslaved mothers. Additionally, the wisdom among planters that working a slave to death and buying a new one was more cost effective than keeping a slave through old age reinforced their excessive dependence on new imports. Approximately 138,000 Africans were imported into Antigua between 1670 and 1820. During the peak period of the trade, 1700–60, Antigua received anywhere from 10,000 to 25,000 Africans per decade. Yet its total slave population never exceeded 40,000 persons at any point before 1834, revealing the extreme brutality of slavery and the inability of Africans to reproduce while enduring such harsh labor conditions.
Nonetheless, the demographic imbalance between whites and blacks became even more severe over the long term. In 1678, Antigua had more than 2,300 whites and more than 2,100 enslaved Africans, but a mere thirty years later, in 1707, the island counted only 500 more whites but around 12,800 slaves, with a ratio of more than 5 enslaved Africans to every white resident. The number of slaves climbed rapidly over the course of the eighteenth century, while that of whites did not. In 1805, roughly 3,000 whites controlled the labor of 36,000 slaves. By 1821, the number of slaves had fallen slightly to just over 31,000, in part because of increasing manumissions, but there were more than 15 slaves to every white inhabitant. The 1821 figures also offer a rare view of slaves' gender distribution. Women numbered around 16,500 and men 14,500. Antigua's enslaved population totaled around 30,000 when the 1833 abolition act was passed.
In Antigua, as in other slave societies throughout the Americas, white men often engaged in sexual partnerships with African-descended women, largely through coercion and despite the illegality of interracial unions. Ultimately, the racial and class advantages of wealthy white men within Caribbean slave societies enabled their mastery over women of all ranks. Their sexual conduct and economic power buttressed a gendered and racialized class hierarchy in which they perceived and sought out white women as respectable wives, colored women of mixed ancestry as sexual companions, and black women as objects of sexual fantasies and adventures. These patterns of sexual relations facilitated the emergence of a small but significant mixed-race community in Antigua with a female majority by the 1800s.
Many mixed-race persons remained enslaved through the eighteenth century, but others were manumitted because of familial relationships with propertied whites. Toward the beginning of the nineteenth century, some were even born into freedom, and a rare few owned slaves themselves. This particular stratum in Antigua, often listed in population reports as "free colored," bore a slippery classification indeed, as those counted among this group were not all of mixed ancestry but included black slaves who had been freed during the decades before abolition. Antigua's free people of color, particularly the literate and propertied among them, occupied a political, economic, and social position between powerful whites and degraded slaves. In the 1780s this group numbered around 1,200 adults; by 1821 it included 1,500 men and 2,300 women.
Unlike the African-descended population, men slightly outnumbered women among Antigua's white residents. Figures for their population vary widely and may be unreliable, but most sources point to a decline in their numbers over time. The white presence peaked at around 5,200 in 1724, likely inclusive of men, women, and children, while five years later another report counted only 1,300 white men and 1,100 white women. Their numbers dipped over the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as sugar estates often failed and the remaining proprietors frequently resorted to absentee ownership. John Luffman, a British traveler to the island in the late 1780s, noted that despite the tax break that planters received for every adult white resident on their properties, an incentive aimed directly at maintaining a "proportionate" balance between whites and slaves, most planters "shamefully evaded" this requirement. Luffman also complained that the planters' tendency to usurp the "ten-acre" lands, which the Crown had designated in 1700 for poor whites to start small farms, also inhibited white settlement. By 1821, the island was home to just 1,140 white men and 840 white women.
Hence, the island's white population was unable to effectively police the activities of slaves with such small numbers and steadily declining profits from sugar. In Antigua, as in most colonial slave societies in the Americas, enslaved men were conscripted into white-led militias, but largely for warfare against competing imperial powers rather than to police their fellow slaves. But in Antigua, even the white men who were supposed to lead the militia often shirked this duty. The island's 1702 militia act admonished wealthy white men who bought their way out of militia service, but the practice continued. In the 1780s, Luffman observed that slaves were unable to hide their amusement at the "unsoldier-like performances" of the local corps, and wondered why "the people in power in the colony should so much neglect that best of institution for public safety, and internal protection, the Militia, when the great disproportion of twelve blacks and colored persons to one white is considered as now-existing, and when it is observed that eleven twelfths of the blacks are slaves."
(Continues...)
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Table of Contents
Illustrations ixAcknowledgments xiii
Introduction. "Me No B'longs to Dem": Emancipation's Possibilities and Limits in Antigua 1
1. A Landscape That Continually Recurred in Passing: The Many Worlds of a Small Place 21
2. So Them Make Laws for Negro, So Them Make Law for Master: Antigua's 1831 Sunday Market Rebellion 57
3. But Freedom till Better: Labor Struggles after 1834 84
4. An Equality with the Highest in the Land?: The Expansion of Black Private and Public Life 117
5. Sinful Conexions: Christianity, Social Surveillance, and Black Women's Bodies in Distress 142
6. Mashing Ants: Surviving the Economic Crisis after 1846 167
7. Our Side: Antigua's 1858 Uprising and the Contingent Nature of Freedom 195
8. "My Color Broke Me Down": Postslavery Violence and Incomplete Freedom in the British Caribbean 224
Notes 233
Bibliography 287
Index 309
What People are Saying About This
"In this carefully crafted, researched, and argued book of social history, Natasha Lightfoot probes the multilayered processes and problems of freedom in Antigua mainly through the voices, motivations, and experiences of the colony's former slaves who struggled against persistent influences of slavery, colonialism, and capitalism, to give their own meanings to real freedom. Troubling Freedom makes a strong contribution to continuing debates about the political/ideological consciousness and agency of former slaves in the Americas in their demands and strivings for full realization of what they thought freedom should be."