Sarah Gray Cary from Boston to Grenada: Shifting Fortunes of an American Family, 1764–1826 by Susan Clair Imbarrato (review)

Sarah Gray Cary from Boston to Grenada is an intimate portrait of a New England family whose fortunes derived from Caribbean sugar and slavery during the Revolutionary era. Susan Clair Imbarrato follows Sarah Cary as her family's heart, connecting husband and children through her correspondence as they spread across the Atlantic for education and trade.

The book is more than a biography. It grapples with the economic, political, and moral struggles that preoccupied the Cary family from their plantation interests in Grenada during the American Revolution, through the 1795 rebellion in the British colony, and beyond. How did the family survive financially in the upheaval of the era? How did they reconcile their perpetuation of slavery in the face of growing abolitionism? Imbarrato examines these questions through the lens of family. Thus, the six chapters follow the ebbs and flows of family fortune: Samuel Cary's struggle to establish himself in first St. Kitts and Grenada in the 1760s in "Seeking Fortune"; Sarah's arrival and the expansion of their family in "Building Prosperity"; Samuel, Jr.'s efforts after the rest of the family returned to Massachusetts in the 1790s; to "Sustaining Family" into the early nineteenth century.

The question of how letters produced family and selfhood is familiar, per Eve Tavor Bannet's Empire of Letters: Letter Manuals and Transatlantic Correspondence, 1680–1820 (Cambridge, UK, 2006), Konstantin Dierks's In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (Philadelphia, 2011), Sarah Pearsall's Atlantic Families: Lives and Letters in the Later Eighteenth Century (Oxford, UK, 2011), and, of course, work by Susan Imbarrato herself. Imbarrato deftly scrutinizes letters as a window into the humanity of her subjects while also recognizing that they wrote within a discursive world not of their making. Letters did not just reflect connections. They forged specific modes of maternal care and filial obligation. Imbarrato paints a stirring portrait of motherhood that ranged from nurture to mentorship to wielding familial obligation for the well-being of the whole. On display is Sarah's strength, but also her vulnerability.

Similarly, Imbarrato deftly probes writings by the Cary men on slavery. She notes that New Englanders are more often implicated in the trade provisioning Caribbean plantations than the actual practices of slavery (3). While this is becoming less true, Imbarrato raises a compelling question of intergenerational adaptation. Cary, Sr. witnessed "the once admired profession of planter-merchant which had inspired several generations of Cary men to pursue careers in the West Indies, became increasingly tainted" (24). Chapter 1 compares the manual Cary, Sr. wrote in 1767 to guide sugar-plantation managers (17) to his treatment of slaves on his own account (40). None of the Carys discussed abolitionism. But Imbarrato finds this interesting in itself, and instead infers recognition of debates from their defensiveness and the writings of known companions. Cary, Sr. and his sons lauded the paternalist slave-holder (31, 177) who cared for his slaves and maintained order in spite of West Indian decadence (29). Imbarrato suggests Cary was "well-intentioned" but "to participate in trade as a West Indian merchant in 1767 required an acceptance of these practices" (49, 27).

Yet writing slipped. Samuel Cary, Jr. noted the 1795 rebellion of French planters in British Grenada enabled slaves a taste of freedom and that they would "return with bitter reluctance to their former Subjection" (125). He confessed in 1808 "the mighty misfortune of being a negro slave in this short life" that made "one more willing to leave it" (180). Despite these recognitions, Samuel's fear of his family's descent into poverty was a more pressing concern (181).

Imbarrato is more comfortable inferring attitudes regarding slavery than sex. In 1791, Samuel, Jr. adopted an orphan boy and sent him to live with his...