Contentious Liberties: American Abolitionists in Post-Emancipation Jamaica, 1834-1866

2. Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica

{ 46 } Slavery and Freedom in Jamaica Although New England and Jamaica shared a common heritage as British colonies, they were separated by a social and cultural gulf as well as geographical distance. As the forefathers of the American missionaries built up their city on a hill in Massachusetts, another Puritan, Oliver Cromwell, oversaw the British Navy’s capture of Jamaica from the Catholic Spanish in 1655. During its first decades as a British colony, Jamaica hardly lived up to the rigorous moral standards of the Lord Protector, and it became a notorious haven for pirates interested in acquiring gold and silver from Spanish ships departing from Mexico. By the eighteenth century , however, stealing material wealth had become secondary to the riches derived from the labor of African slaves on sugar estates. Europeans and Americans had acquired a taste for sugar, and planters who had been given land grants on the island were eager to supply the need. Like the British colonies of Virginia and Barbados, Jamaica became an important agricul2 slavery and freedom in jamaica { 4 } tural producer fitting into a transatlantic triangle connecting the mother country with her North American and Caribbean possessions. Vast numbers of African slaves were imported to Jamaica, and for those who survived the Middle Passage, a period of seasoning occurred, in which Africans were “broken,” as well as tested with new diseases and a new labor regime. Throughout the eighteenth century, newly imported captives replenished an ever-decreasing population of slaves in the West Indies. As a testament to the brutality of Jamaican slavery, although 50,000 Africans had been brought to the island, only 311,000 people were emancipated in 1834, a stark contrast to the reproducing slave population in the U.S. South that had gone from around 650,000 imported Africans to four million enslaved people on the eve of the Civil War.1 As Alexander Byrd has described, the harsh labor conditions were only one part of what made life in Jamaica especially difficult at the end of the eighteenth century. In the 180s and 190s, “successive environmental tragedies and disasters,” including hurricanes, droughts, earthquakes, and epidemics, merged with “the general disasters and tragedies of Jamaican servitude,” and “inflected a significant portion of this generation with a fatalism that went beyond that of mere enslavement.”2 The violence and upheaval of slavery had many consequences. Byrd and other historians of slavery have pointed out the problem of understanding a slave society as divided only along lines of planter and slave, white and black, because the slave community itself hardly represented a united front.3 A significant number of African slaves in Jamaica had fled their captivity and had settled in the mountains, creating Maroon villages that waged a decades-long war against those who would reenslave them. The British and Maroons signed a treaty in 139 in which the Maroons agreed to defend the island and not to harbor fugitive slaves in exchange for their freedom. Among the enslaved people, divisions between different groups of Africans, and African-born and Jamaican-born people existed, although after the end of the slave trade in 180, the Jamaican-born creoles became a majority. The growing population of free “browns” or colored people, many of whom were the manumitted children of whites and their slave mistresses, or “housekeepers,” settled in town, and often tried to separate themselves from the rural enslaved blacks, creating more fractures along class and color lines. Geography and work also separated enslaved people in Jamaica. Jamaica’s terrain meant that it had more agricultural diversity { 48 } chapter two than other sugar-dominated islands. Large sugar estates prevailed on the coastal plains, and the cooler temperatures in the mountainous interior of the island made the land conducive to coffee plants. Animal pens raising beasts of burden and cattle for food also marked the Jamaican landscape. Historian Barry Higman estimates that, in 1832, fewer than half of Jamaican slaves worked on sugar estates. Fourteen percent worked on coffee properties, and almost 13 percent for livestock pens. Smaller numbers of slaves lived in town or were hired out by their masters for jobs repairing roads or as seasonal labor.4 Amid this diversity, an Afro-creole culture developed in Jamaica. Creole religious practices and beliefs, as well as creole understandings of land, property, and gender, all informed how black Jamaicans...