Paternalism, Paranoia and Methods of Mastery in the English West Indies:

A Social History of Slavery in the Caribbean

Tyler Rhudy

History 4401: Seminar on the African Diaspora in the Atlantic World

Professor Joe Lunn

December 12, 2017

 “Fear--that absolute coercion that supersedes all questions of right--is the leading
principle upon which all governments in slave societies are supported.”
- Bryan Edwards,18061

“‘You know,’ observed Robert, ‘it appears to me that you are as much afraid of these
people as they are of you.’”
“‘Of course we are,’ said Rider; ‘it has been a case of fear on both sides. Fear is the very
texture of the mind of all white people here; fear and boredom and sometimes disgust. That is
why so many of us drink.’”
-Henry de Lisser, The White Witch of Rose Hall2

For the purposes of this paper, the African Diaspora refers to the dispersion of

West Africans people groups throughout the Atlantic World and the best historical

contributions this paper imparts lie in its analysis of primary source documents including

wills, diaries, pamphlets and travel accounts. Based on a study of the methods used to

control enslaved Africans, this paper will show how the harsh treatment of slaves bred

discontent, violence and revolt in these societies and analyses the extreme fear and

paranoia consistent in the planter class as a result of this system. The means of

subjection employed by Planters were martial, psychological, educational and spiritual.

Planter and enslaved Africans lived in a state of war with one another. That enslaved

Africans arriving at a sugar island found a hell on earth is no exaggeration and there

could never have existed a worse slave system. Paternalism refers to the father figure

mentality found in documents written by Planters. The English West Indies refers to

Antigua, Barbados, Bermuda, Jamaica, Montserrat, Nevis, and Saint Kitts. However,

1
Bryan Edwards and Daniel McKinnen, “The History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the
West Indies,” in Trevor G. Burnard’s, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves
in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 216.
2
Herbert G. de Lisser, The White Witch of Rose Hall (1929) (Oxford: Macmillan Caribbean, 2007), 71.

1
Barbados and Jamaica will be the primary focus as they were the most important and

influential islands within the English Plantation Complex.

Sources from that time show that sugar islands like Barbados and Jamaica were

brutal places to live and, put simply, the relationship between slave and free was less of

a class struggle than it was a perpetual state of war. The slave system fostered

perverted and absurd relationships between all classes. Foremost in the minds of every

planter was the possibility of a slave insurrection. This paper analyses the notion of

paternalism, coupled with the violent realities of daily life, in the English Caribbean,

which cause a disconnect—a cognitive dissonance—in the rationale of any Planter

seeking to excuse their absurd and perverted motives. Methods of mastery will also be

explored at length.

Planters and other whites made preparations for possible revolts as well as using

the martial strategy of divide and conquer to separate, confuse and retard any

organization of would be rebels.3 Finally, the denial of literacy and of Christian baptism

further alienated enslaved Africans becoming a method of oppression in its own right.

Sugar was the primary crop produced in the West Indies. The mass production of

this revolutionary cash crop, beginning in the mid-Sevrnteenthth Century, changed the

human diet forever. Of the complexities of sugar manufacturing, there will be little

digression, save the following: It was a skilled process involving clearing the rainforest,

planting, weeding, manuring, harvesting, grinding, boiling and curing. The end product

was either a granulated sugar cone, molasses, or rum. As the process matured in the

3
Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657), ed. Karen Ordahl Kupperman
(Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 2011), 96-97.

2
West Indies, sugar became cheaper which drove down the price making it more

available to the general population in Europe causing the demand to soar. These

economic factors, combined with the addictive quality of the product, created a sugar

boom that drove Planters to great lengths in order to capitalize on this most liquid of

cash crops.

As outlined roughly by historian Philip D. Curtin, the Plantation Complex in the

New World functioned with five general rules: (1) most of the labor was forced labor; (2)

because of the deadly environment, the population was not self-sustaining but needed a

constant supply of imported labor just to maintain itself; (3) the system was created for

large-scale mercantile/capitalist mono-crop plantations with fifty to several hundred

workers; (4) the application of law was feudal and Planters dealt out punishment for

crimes as well as policing the area; and (5) the plantation’s purpose was to supply

distant markets where nearly all of the product was shipped requiring trade with said

market to import staple food, labor and other needs.4

This paper uses many primary sources. The Planters who were educated kept

diaries, wrote wills and left documents for us. Most of the enslaved population were

entirely unlettered and left almost no account of their experience. However, Olaudah

Equiano, Venture Smith and Mary Prince give us some insight. The sources used will

set the groundwork for an understanding of the methods of mastery and the slave

experience in the English West Indies and it will explore the value of each source for

this topic.

4
Philip D. Curtin, The Rise and Fall of the Plantation Complex 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), 11.

3
 The date of the most useful sources range from approximately 1650 - 1780. They

are as follows: First, Richard Ligon (b. 1585 - d. 1662) who wrote A True and Exact

History of the Island of Barbados in 1657. Ligon was an English gentleman who fled

England when Oliver Cromwell and the Parliamentarians (Roundheads) took over. He

befriended the wealthy Barbadian planter James Drax, when he reached the island

around 1648. Ligon spent three years in Barbados where the sugar plantation system

had just begun to gain prominence economically. His book was an amateur scientific

analysis of the island along with his personal experiences which captured much of

Barbados’ social history. In fact, he is the source for Seventh Century Barbadian social

history.

Another important source are the documents left by Henry Drax (b. ? - d. 1683)

Drax was the eldest son of pioneering planter James Drax. He left historians an

important source when he wrote his ‘Instructions’ to his plantation manager describing

exactly how to run his large sugar works with over 300 slaves. Although the text deals

primarily with the management of land, animals and human property, there are also

important passages dealing with the social relationships between planter, indentured

servants and slaves, albeit entirely from the point-of-view of Henry Drax.

Christopher Codrington the Younger was also the son of a Barbadian sugar

baron who had pioneered the trade along with James Drax. Born in Barbados, well

educated in London, and seasoned on European battlefields, Codrington had a

paternalistic nature that is evident in his will. He sympathized with the plight of enslaved

Africans but was at a loss about how to amend the slave system. He founded

Codrington College in St. John’s, Barbados which still stands today. He wanted both

4
Black and Whites to attend but the college was fiercely contested and stalled by the

other Planter interests toward the end of the Seventeenth Century. Inasmuch as

Codrington wanted to eventually free his slaves, his expensive upbringing and family

fortune were built on the backs of those enslaved Africans, many of whom died because

of the deadly pace of work and horrid conditions he and his father continued to

propagate until their deaths.

Thomas Thistlewood--an Englishman in Jamaica--was a one time overseer at the

Egypt sugar plantation who eventually bought his own land and purchased his own

slaves. Thistlewood was a violent master who serves historians as an example of a

practical villain. His massive collection of personal diaries survive to give us a sample of

cruelty in Eighteenth Century Jamaica. The social value of his diaries are important for

understanding the conditions of slavery in the sugar islands of the West Indies and how

Whites maintained mastery.

Father Antoine Biet left a recently discovered account of his trip to Barbados in

1654. He, like most visitors, was appalled by the brutality of whites toward blacks in

Barbados. Biet was a French Catholic priest and eventually a guest of Planter James

Drax a few years after Richard Ligon left the island. His account captures the social

history of Barbados in the early days before the mature Plantation Complex had been

fully developed and he ranks second only to Ligon for capturing, well, the social history

of Barbados. These sources are indispensable for understanding slavery in the English

Caribbean.

The Trauma

5
 For slaves, planter brutality and their methods of mastery must have seemed

like an extension of the nightmarish conditions they experienced before they arrived in

the West Indies. Arriving in the Caribbean from West Africa, many had already endured

much evading death many times before reaching the New World. They were often

kidnapped from their villages or taken in war which claimed the lives of many in the

process; next they were marched to the coast to be held in slave castles awaiting sale;

after which they boarded a ship—the most dangerous time for mutiny—for the dreaded

Middle Passage across the Atlantic; coming off the boat dejected and bewildered, many

were kept on suicide watch. When slaves were brought to market, they were sold to

frenzied and jubilant buyers who were utterly foreign to them and who used any form of

control that was perceived as less than deadly like whippings and brandings but which

often were. Each of the enslaved experienced a great deal of culture shock and terror

upon their arrival as well. The psychological torments, though outside the scope of this

paper, bear little resemblance to anything the reader can imagine, outside of the

Holocaust of European Jews in the 1940’s. Nor is this particular kind of Caribbean

slavery truly comparable to North American slavery—terrible as that was. The difference

is the relentless Caribbean growing season.

Everyone in the English West Indies faced a deadly world but for the enslaved

survival was often a form of resistance in itself. Seasoning was a process that killed 25

to 31 percent of enslaved Africans in the first year.5 It meant surviving new forms of

malaria and other lethal diseases, poor nutrition, merciless over work and exposure to

5
Michael A. Gomez, Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), 88.

6
the elements not to mention learning to work and live in a strange environment.6 Above

all, it meant surviving the torture and violence meant to subjugate the slave population.

Many had once known freedom and that meant dealing with the psychological malady

that their condition was sure to impose upon them.

The pace of work was the main contributing factor of an early death for a Slave.

In the Caribbean, the growing season was almost nonstop making each island a sort-of

agricultural factory with no break in the seasons. It was industrial in scale and its engine

was slave power. This combination gave the enslaved a life expectancy of nine years,

conservatively, upon arrival. Even more atrocious was Barbadian life expectancy. The

historian Michael Gomez tells us that conditions for enslaved Africans were so deadly,

“the importation of some 85,000 captives between 1708 and 1735 raised the enslaved

population from 42,000 to only 46,000.”7 Barbadian planter Edward Littleton rationed

that losing 6% of his workforce a year was normal. With this logic, a planter would kill off

his entire workforce of one hundred slaves in nineteen years.8

Language can have a dehumanizing effect and in the parlance of the Plantation

Complex, Whites would often use animalistic terms to describe enslaved Africans. As in

war, dehumanization allows for all sorts of abuses. Words like brutes, beasts, ants,

bees or drones were commonly references made by White’s. Jamaican planter Thomas

Thistlewood referred to Maroons (escaped slaves who resisted recapture and lived free

6
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 89.
7
Gomez, Reversing Sail, 89.
8
Peter Thompson, "Henry Drax's Instructions on the Management of a Seventeenth-Century Barbadian
Sugar Plantation," The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 66, no. 3 (2009): 575. http://0-
www.jstor.org.wizard.umd.umich.edu/stable/40467523.

7
in the Jamaican interior) as those “wild Negroes,”9 further insinuating an inhuman

quality about them.10*

Planters and other whites used these terms to describe people who were forced

to work in a system that was, itself, inhuman. Here, it bears mentioning that the term

‘chattel slavery’ which refers to enslaved people who can be bought and sold as

property and who are in perpetual slavery—a condition passed from parent to child—is

used in the same vein as the word ‘cattle’ and are known so historically because they

are listed in the same sentences as cattle and other commodities in wills or property

assessments from sugar barons. It is the author's assertion that enslaved Africans were

treated worse that cattle and other animals by West Indian sugar barons and their

hirelings. Mary Prince, an enslaved Antiguan, attests to this when she says, “They tie up

slaves like hogs—moore [fasten] them up like cattle, and they lick them, so as hogs, or

cattle, or horses never were flogged.”11

Their disregard and callousness is, further, captured in the Barbados Assembly

minutes where Planters described certain Africans groups who died more rapidly than

others from overwork as, “People Nursed up in Luxury and Ease, and wholly

Unaccustomed to worke, which in a short time dye upon our handes to our Irrepairable

9
Trevor G. Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-
Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 216.
10
Another commonality involves giving slaves lofty names from antiquity. A few examples include:
Agamemnon, Achilles or ‘Mary-Princess of Wales;’ now known to the world as Mary Prince, an
Bermudian-Antiguan slave whose story was transcribed by The Anti-Slavery Society in Aldermanbury,
England. The givers of such names do it out of no wistfulness but, rather, out of caulous humor, spite or,
perhaps, akin to that of a pet.
11
Mary Prince and Moira Ferguson, The History of Mary Prince, A West Indian Slave (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1993) 120.

8
Loss.”12 The Planters savage and calculated use of force created a deadly pace of

work. Thompson tells us, “No human being would even grudgingly undertake it at the

pace and at the scale necessary except under duress.”13 Therefore, it was the treatment

of the enslaved Africans that brought about this observation—this inhuman effort. It took

the total lack of human rights, much less civil or Christian rights, to control the

population and hold mastery over them.

No people group is enslaved without coercion; and violence, as a rule, is the

most common form of intimidation. Those who visited Jamaica and Barbados were

often appalled at how severe and how common this oppression was. Father Antoine

Biet left this account of brutality toward an enslaved African, in Barbados, who had

stolen a pig,

“They treat their Negro slaves with a great deal of severity. If some

go beyond the limits of the plantation on a Sunday they are given fifty

blows with a cudgel. These often bruise them severely. If they commit

some other slightly more serious offense they . . . are beaten to excess,

sometimes up to the point of applying a firebrand all over their bodies

which makes them shriek with despair. . . [for the man who stole the pig]

The overseer, after having had him treated thus for seven or eight days,

cut off one of his ears, had it roasted, and forced him to eat it. He wanted

12
Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624 -
1713 (Chapel Hill: Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and the University of
North Carolina Press, 2012), 331. Further, in this paper, the primary source quotes, if misspelled, appear
in the published text that way and are left intact without using [sic]. It is intentional and left intact for
authenticity and because some for the texts are rife with misspellings, it reads easier that way. When [sic]
is used, it is because the publication is from a secondary source and includes it.
13
Thompson, Henry Drax’s Instructions, 578.

9
 to do the same to the other,”14 but Biet claims that he plead for the

overseer to stop. And he did. This was all done in town (Bridgetown,

Barbados) as an example to other Blacks and, perhaps, more accurately,

as an example to anyone arriving on the island.

Richard Ligon captured a grizzly episode in his book A True and Exact History of

the Island of Barbados. The sugar baron Colonel Walrond learned that slaves were

suggesting to each other that they escape their dreadful condition by means of suicide.

The belief among visitors like Ligon and Planters like Henry Drax and Walrond was: If a

White man threatened to punish a slave, they should carry out that punishment quickly

because the treatment was so severe that some slaves would take their own life as a

result of their anxiety. Many West African traditions taught that wherever one went,

when they died, their souls would return to their home village. After losing several of his

slaves to suicides, one Colonel Walrond—looking at the dead bodies—“caused one of

their heads to be cut off, and set upon a pole a dozen foot high . . . having done that,

caused all his Negroes to come forth, and march roundabout this head, and bid them

look on it, whether this were not the head of such a one that hanged himself . . .

acknowledging, he then told them, That they were in main error, in thinking they went to

their own countries, after they were dead.”15 Ligon tells us this “sad, yet lively

spectacle,”16 curbed the rash of suicides on Walrond’s plantation for good. Thomas

14
Jerome S. Handler, “Father Antoine Biet’s Visit to Barbados in 1654.” Journal of the Barbados Museum
and Historical Society no. 32 (1967): 69.
15
Ligon, A True and Exact History, 103.
16
Ligon, A True and Exact History, 103

10
Trydon whom wrote about Barbados, shortly after Ligon, tells us that five conspirators

killed themselves rather than stand trial for plotting an insurrection.17

It is no wonder Whites lived in fear. The sugar barons of Barbados (paternalistic,

though they may be) knew they lived in a state of war against those they forced to labor

for them. In a written reproach of the Planter class, one Seventeenth Century

commentator quoted the Roman philosopher Seneca, “You have as many enemies, as

you have slaves.”18 Evidence that the Planters were paranoid and that they lived in

martial readiness can be found in Ligon’s description of their architecture. “Water they

save likewise from their houses, by gutters and eves, which carry it down to cisterns . . .

their houses, many of which are built in the manner of Fortifications, have Lines,

Bulwarks, and Bastions to defend themselves, in case there should be any uproar or

commotion in the Island, either by Christian servants, or Negro slaves . . . [they boil the

water in the cisterns and] throw down upon the bodies of the Negro’s, scalding hot.” 19

Fear of revolt was not always a paranoid construction of a guilty conscience. By 1716,

Blacks outnumbered Whites 3:1 in the English Caribbean—a virtual army of slaves.20

When Richard Ligon arrived in Barbados in 1647, the Planters had just put down

a revolt which had been betrayed at the last moment. They were doubly concerned that

the revolt wound unite the enslaved and White servants but this was paranoia because

17
Thomas Trydon, “Great News from the Barbados or a Truthful Account of the Grand Conspiracy 1676,”
in Versions of Blackness: Key Texts on Slavery in the Seventeenth Century, edited by Derek Hughes,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 342.
18
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, (d. 65 ce), Roman philosopher, Epistle XLVII in Jean-Baptiste du Tertre,
Histoire Generale des Antilles Habitées par les Francois (1667-1671) in Versions of Blackness: Key
Texts on Slavery in the Seventeenth Century, edited by Derek Hughes, (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), 342.
19
Ligon, A True and Exact History, 75.
20
Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 380.

11
no historical record of a plan for a unified class revolt exists in any English sugar island.

One reason for this: Racism on the part of poor Whites was too potent and the mistrust

by slaves toward a population in which their overseers came from was too great.

The plan for Cuffee’s Rebellion was discovered in 1674. This account was written

by Thomas Tryon in his A True and Faithful Account of the Grand Conspiracy or Great

News from the Barbadoes; it was a sort of pamphlet to promote immigration to

Barbados. Tryon tells us that after overhearing some slaves in the garden, one of the

house slaves, (a young woman) went to her masters and revealed the plot to, “kill all

the Baccararoes or White people on the Island within a fortnight.”21 These

insurrectionists were rounded up and “Seventeen were found guilty and executed. Six

burnt alive, and eleven beheaded, their bodies being dragged through the street . . .

afterwards being burnt along with those who were burnt alive.”22

One of the condemned who was chained to a stake and ready to burn, at the execution

was asked if he would reveal everyone involved in the conspiracy. When he agreed, the

victim next to him yelled, “Thou Fool, are there not enough of our Country-men killed

already? Art thou minded to kill them all?”23 At that point, the would-be informant

refused to say anything else. The Whites in attendance yelled and scoffed at both of the

condemned men crying, “Tony! Sirrah! [since you are so brave] We shall see you fry

bravely by and by [eventually].” Sirrah responded, “If you Roast me to day, you cannot

21
Trydon, “Great News from the Barbados or a Truthful Account of the Grand Conspiracy 1676,” in
Versions of Blackness: Key Texts on Slavery in the Seventeenth Century, edited by Derek Hughes,
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 342.
22
Curtis, Great News, 342.
23
Curtis, Great News, 343. ,

12
Roast me tomorrow.”24 Such resolve speaks to the amount of fortitude it took for slaves

to resist the Plantation Complex. It was suicide to rebel; Planters made sure of that and

more so if slaves intended to overthrow an entire island, as was the case in Haiti. The

site of the most successful slave rebellion in history.

Trydon wrote a pamphlet that was intended to draw people to Barbados but

instead the author was so traumatized by the violence he witnessed that his remarks

are full of cognitive dissonance—a psychological term commonly used often in racial

discrimination studies to show the mental discomfort when someone tries to hold two

conflicting beliefs. While most common in Planters who try to justify savage behavior

(like colonel Walrond or Christopher Codrington) it bears mentioning here as Trydon

sought to portray the lovely scenery of Barbados and the brutality which does not make

for good promotion. To Trydon, Barbados is a, “fruitful and flourishing island . . . [a]

spacious and profitable garden,”25 But the sugar island is obviously a dangerous place,

subject to revolt and murder in ones sleep. Trydon could not help but view slaves who

unveiled the plot as honest and faithful and the insurrectionist as wretches; this is not

just pure racism but, perhaps, part of a general catharsis born of relief from escaping

the near insurrection with his life.

The reason for these drastic attempts to overthrow the establishment were due to

the inhumanity of the Whites and their methods of mastery. These accounts are fraught

with the racist overtones of their day. Both Tryon and Ligon believed that conditions in

the West African homeland, were worse than what the enslaved bore in the West

24
Curtis, Great News, 343.
25
Curtis, Great News, 342.

13
Indies. As Trydon gloats over the discovery of Cuffe’s plot, he writes about the enslaved

as, “ungrateful wretches, (who I have often heard confess to live better in servitude

there [Barbados] than at liberty in their own native country) [sic].”26 This assertion could

hardly be true, based on the events just described in this social history. For so many,

the islands were hell on earth. The supposed West African cannibalism (often referred

to in the accounts and typically a wholesale lie) could never compare to the extreme

displays of violence executed by Europeans toward Africans throughout the Caribbean.

But these sentiments pervaded books and articles in the mid-seventeenth century. One

slave law references the, “Disorder, Rapines and Inhumanities to which they [slaves]

are naturally prone and inclined,”27 referencing the supposed barbarity of West Africans.

They are naturally inclined, indeed, as a result of European brutality. Sedition,

insurrection and plotting by the enslaved toward their enslavers was a result of the state

of war that existed between these groups. Certainly slaves were ‘naturally inclined’

toward defiance. Indeed, anyone would be when their only other option was to be

starved, beaten and worked to death.

Olaudah Equiano, kidnapped from his home in West Africa as a child, was a

West Indian slave in the Eighteenth Century. Eventually, after buying his own freedom,

he penned this judgment upon the planter class in 1789, “When you make men slaves,

you deprive them of half their virtue, you set them, in your own conduct, an example of

fraud, rapine, and cruelty, and compel them to live with you in a state of war; and yet

you complain they are not honest and faithful! You stupify them with stripes . . . keep

26
Curtis, Great News, 342.
27
Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 242.

14
them in a state of ignorance . . . yet assert they are incapable of learning.” 28 One Jean-

Philippe Garran-Coulon, an observer of the Haitian revolution (a French sugar colony),

whom wrote a long report during that tumultuous time tells us, “Slaves are in a

permanent state of war with their masters and the government that maintains slavery.” 29

In this climate, it is difficult to understand where paternalism took shape. The

brutality common in the West Indies also points to the duplicity within the paternalistic

ideas that many Planters held. Paternalism and the religious sentiments of Planters

along with paranoia created a cognitive dissonance that is hard to miss even for the

casual reader. Visitors to the English West Indies who suggested baptism for the

enslaved were quickly and harshly corrected because Planter mastery depended so

much on the denial of knowledge to perpetuate slave ignorance and further alienate that

population. White dominance would be complete.

There were Planters, like Thomas Thistlewood, who did not display this duel

nature. He knew what he was--and, in many ways, he was a monster. This middle class

Jamaican planter (or gardener, as he called himself) was a former overseer at the Egypt

plantation in Jamaica. The name Egypt suggests that this plantation owner, too, must

have come to terms with his own role. Thistlewood tortured, branded, beat and raped

his slaves.30 It is clear from his diary that he lived in constant fear of insurrection. Every

horn blow or drum beat caused him to stop what he was doing (often, writing in his

28
Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa the
African. (Ed. Henry Louis Gates. New York: Penguin, 2002), 99.
29
Jean-Philippe Garran de Coulon, Rapport sur les troubles de Saint-Domingue, fait au nom de la
Commission des Colonies, des Comités du Salut Public, de Législation et de Marine, réunis, 4 vols.
(Paris, 1798), 2:194; 209, 4:58; Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian
Revolution, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The BelKnap Press of Harvard University, 2004) 105.
30
Trevor G. Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-
Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 216.

15
diary) to investigate. His diaries serve as a documented example of just how despicable

a Planter could be and his account requires no further digression.

For North American slaves, Christian conversion was often encouraged and

became a stabilizing force in their lives. In the English West Indies, however,

Christianity was not shared between Blacks and Whites until much later. The denial of

baptism was one more way to keep slaves from gaining power, moral contention or

education. The enforcement of this policy perpetuated slave ignorance as it pertains to

rights and agency in a European dominated society. If slaves understood the ideas and

attitudes supposedly ascribed to Whites through Christianity and egalitarian philosophy,

it would have shown Planter's blatant hypocrisy against the brutal reality of the

Plantation Complex from any angle. Moral agency is still agency and no Planter would

not dare extend that to the enslaved.

Religion compels people to gather and organize. Communication between slaves

was dangerous to Whites. In 1672, the Jamaican Council decreed that the, “safety and

interest of all the planters in this island does consist in restraining, by all ways

imaginable, the communication of Negroes with one another.”31 Thus, social gatherings

were seldom tolerated unless a trusted overseer was present.

Many whites of the planter class fancied themselves father figures to those they

enslaved. Perhaps this attitude was a way for planters to deflect the true means by

which they achieved their mastery. Only through brutality, degradation, violent

domination and alienation were many of the enslaved cowed. Those means of

31
Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 360.

16
subjection were martial, psychological, educational and spiritual. Planter, slave and

indentured servant lived in a state of war where planter paranoia was, often, well

founded and where poisoning, murder and revolts were common. The hypocrisy of the

paternal facade was evident to visitors to the English West Indies. There exists,

however, a few honorable mentions of Planter’s who were kinder than most of their

peers.

Christopher Codrington the Younger was the son of a successful Planter in

Barbados of the same name. The treatment of slaves in Barbados and in Jamaica was

a concern to him. In his will, written eight years before his death, he bequeathed his

plantation and most of his money for the building of a church and college for both

Whites and Blacks alike. The organization was called, The Society for Propagation of

the Christian Religion in Forreighn parts. The will reads, “I have always thought it very

barbarous that so little care should be taken of the bodys and so much less the souls of

our slaves. Their condition has cost me many a mortifying reflection. I know not how I

shall be able to mend it in any one respect, but feeding my slaves well.” Codrington

goes onto say that if he tried to secure the liberty of his slaves, by law, he would be

opposed by all of the Planters--and he meant violently opposed.32 This study has found

that when a White man wants to baptize or educate a slave they are met with fierce

resistance.

Another energetic Planters son was Henry Drax. He, too, understood his role as

paternalistic. “”In the first place it is my desyre that not onley for the more Comfortable

32
George C. Simmons “Towards a Biography of Christopher Codrington the Younger,” Caribbean Studies
12, no. 1 (Apr., 1972): 39. All capitalization and spelling kept from this edited version.

17
Support of yourself and those of my family that shall Eatt at table with you[,] as also for

the relief of all sutch Either Whites or Blacks that shall be sick in the family that you

keep A plenty full table.”33

It is fairly common that a Planter, whose family is successful, will bemoan the

institution of slavery in a will or letter. In the case of Henry Drax, he instructs his

plantation manager to be kind to his slaves but undercuts his own efforts by prescribing

violence on the following page. “If att any time you take to punnishment . . . lett it be

Emediatly executed. [Put them in] stocks, or laying them by the necks or heels . . . [with]

blows Uswaly well . . . Bot if at any time there are any taken to Stealing Sugar Molases

or Rum which is the finall product of all our Endevors . . . [t]hey must be severly handled

theire being No punishment tooe terrible, on such an ocation as doeth not deprive the

party of Either life or limbs.”34

Even if a Planter like Christopher Codrington or James Drax had genuine

intentions of freeing and educating his slaves (and it is doubtful of they did) they

understood that freeing an army of slaves on a small island in the West Indies was

complicated at best. Freeing one plantation could lead to freeing them all.

One of the methods of mastery, usually overlooked, is the denial of religion for

slaves of the English in the West Indies. Some West African religious practices were

tolerated but they were closely monitored. One reason for this method lies in the divide

and conquer strategy where one aim is to prevent or disrupt communication. Slaves

33
Simmons, Codrington the Younger, 41.
34
Peter Thompson, "Henry Drax's Instructions on the Management of a Seventeenth-Century Barbadian
Sugar Plantation," The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 66, no. 3 (2009): 565

18
were not allowed to have group meetings of any sort and no drums or conch shells

either for fear that slaves could signal an uprising. The second reason has more to do

with the denial of literacy which is, itself, a method of disrupting and denying

communication.

The historian Richard Dunn, in his essential work Sugar and Slaves tells us, “In

refusing to admit slaves into their churches, the English planters differed markedly from

contemporary French, Spanish and Portuguese slave owners.”35 For Roman Catholics,

baptism was rather simple; but for Anglican and other Protestant denominations some

kind of formal instruction was required. This meant education and that was taboo. It is

the assertion of this author that education could lead to a better understanding of

English thought and English law which could lead to slaves gaining some kind of

agency through that education. There are instances of Quakers in Barbados who are

continually fined for taking their slaves to church but these Quakers were a minority and

not taken seriously.36 The Planter class wanted solidarity in this respect. In 1657

Richard Ligon wrote about his experience with a slave named Sambo in Barbados.

Ligon was overseeing a group of slaves felling trees in the tropical forest when

he pulled out a compass to orient himself. Sambo, a slave that Ligon thought very highly

of, asked about the compass. Ligon was an amateur scientist and showed Sambo how

the compass needle could only point north and south. When Sambo asked why, he was

told, “Because of the huge Rocks of Loadstone that were in the North part of the world,

which had a quality to draw iron to it . . . this needle being iron would always stand that

35
Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 249.
36
Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 249.

19
way,” and after waving an axe under the compass, making the needle move, Sambo

was put in, “the greatest admiration that I ever saw [in] a man,” and asked that he “might

be made a Christian: for he thought to be a Christian was to be enbued with all those

knowledges he wanted.”37

Here Ligon shows his naiveté, by promising to ask James Drax (Sambo’s owner)

if he could be baptized. When the plea was made, Drax responded that Barbadians,

“were governed by the Laws of England,” and he “could not make a Christian a slave.”38

After some banter by Ligon who said there was a difference, Drax continued,

“being once a Christian, he could no more account him a slave, and so lose the hold

they had on them . . . and by that means should open such a gap, as all the Planters in

the Island would curse him. So I was struck mute, and poor Sambo left out of the

Church.”39 This fact is further backed by Drax’s “Instructions” when he says, "I shall be

certainly opposed by all the Planters in general if I should go about to secure their limbs

and lives by a law . . . but much more if I should promote the baptizing of our slaves." 40

Father Antoine Biet, too, recognized and lamented the bar on extending religion to the

enslaved in Barbados telling us, “the masters never think of their slaves’ souls. One

does not speak to them about any religion or religious exercises.”41 Although he was a

Catholic in a protestant land, the sentiment seems genuine. It was the inevitable literacy

that scared most Planters when considering baptising enslaved Africans.

37
Ligon, True and Exact History, 101.
38
Ligon, True and Exact History, 102.
39
Ligon, True and Exact History, 102.
40
Peter Thompson "Henry Drax's Instructions on the Management of a Seventeenth-Century Barbadian
Sugar Plantation." The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series 66, no. 3 (2009): 565-604.
41
Jerome S. Handler, “Father Antoine Biet’s Visit to Barbados in 1654.” Journal of the Barbados Museum
and Historical Society no. 32 (1967), pg. 84

20
 The second explanation made by Drax was undoubtedly the most accurate; the

Planter’s wanted solidarity in their brutal practice of mastery. Any freedom for slaves

could be a doorway to even greater freedoms. It is likely that these kind of questions

came up often. This recorded event shows the dissonance between paternalism and the

violent oppression that West Indian Planters kept their slaves under. It also

demonstrates that Richard Ligon is undoubtedly the most valuable and comprehensive

source for early Barbadian social history.

Jamaica differs some from Barbados. The Jamaican Slaves Laws of 1662

mention bringing Christianity to enslaved Africans or, “caused to be baptized all such

that they can make sensible of a Deity and the Christian Faith.”42 It is not that

Christianizing slaves made up for their plight but it was an indication that Planters in

Jamaica recognized the humanity of their slaves. T

Insofar as comparing slave experiences is unfair, this is one example that speaks

to Dunn’s assertion that Jamaican slavery was probably more tolerable that Barbadian

slavery. It is hardly contested that Barbados was the flagship for brutality throughout the

English West Indies.

Planters did not want to advertise their treatment of enslaved Africans. Nor did

they want to give away their trade secrets or disclose all of their property to others in

England. These sources give the historian a partial overview of how these fabulously

wealthy men viewed themselves.

42
Dunn, Sugar and Slaves, 244. C O. 139/1/42, 55-58.

21
 Overall, paternalism amounted to a bad joke. The only way a Planter comes to

be revered as a father figure would be after the enslaved had failed in every attempt to

resist, and even then it is dubious whether both parties would see it that way. It is a

mental construct and has very little to do with the abusive relationship of Planter and

slave. Social histories allow us to look at instances in daily life that represent the

conditions people lived in and the relationships they formed. This paper comes close to

pointing out what Planter rationale looked like but cannot touch the psychological

questions that arise. This is partially due to a lack of sources from the enslaved due, in

part, to the thoroughly disruptive nature of the Plantation Complex toward slave literacy.

The historian must look to people like Mary Prince, Eloudah Equiano and Venture Smith

to fill in those gaps.

Ultimately, Barbados, Jamaica and the rest of the English West Indies were

constructs of mercantilism or proto-capitalism. In this Age of Reason, the rising

merchant class was breaking economic barriers all over Europe. Younger sons of

younger sons could now take their small inheritances and surpass their more fortunate

cousins and brothers if they had the will to enslave their fellow man. Sugar was used as

cash and the sugar barons, in a way, were producing money. This was the reason for

such ruthlessness on their part and this is what fueled the African Diaspora.

It is important to understand the collision of cultures in the West Indies. A social

history of sugar islands begins and ends with a look at the violence at its root--

conceived in the genocide of the Amerindians during Columbus’ Destruction of the

Indies to the civil rights disparities that exist today between those of European, West

African and Amerindian descent. All social relationships in the West Indies, from this

22
time, were based on force. James Drax tried to imply that, when he answered Ligon’s

question about the baptism of Sambo. Drax's response would better be stated as, ‘You

want me to treat them as if they were human . . . How could I after all I have already

done to them?’ It was easier for Planters to take the view that enslaved Africans were

sub-human.

Life in the Caribbean today is permeated with the reality of the Plantation

Complex that brought so many people together from Europe and West Africa to create

this New World.

Postscript
I asked myself, not long ago, what was bothering me about this paper. I believed
there was room for adventure writing, studying the wills, diaries, pamphlets and books
written by Planters and other whites in the English West Indies. That era has always
made for good storytelling, from the contemporaneous Robinson Crusoe (1719) and
later Treasure Island (1883) to the myriad of modern stories about those salty sea dogs;
pirates and privateers. I found, to my consternation, that this was inarguably a period of
intense genocide. Each and every conclusion poignant—every statistic grim. What kept
me going was the belief that if I dug deep enough, perhaps, I would find a silver lining in
the midst of the carnage. What I found were some of humanity's most abhorrent acts on
display. The beatings and brandings; the hangings and beheadings; the starvations,
burnings, rapes and otherwise perverted relationships, they were but trade secrets to
the offenders. These findings, did, for a time, let the wind out of my sail convicting me to
confront my motives--even my own racism, as no doubt studying difficult material can
do. Indeed it was no less difficult than it was traumatizing. Through prayer and
meditation, I found my human spirit the most affronted.
In the end, this historical account is but a peek into that singular emotion as
described by Joseph Conrad who sought adventure in the Congo chasing the “blank
spots on the map.” On the other side of the Atlantic, from the Caribbean, he found
himself involved in a similar genocide within the late Nineteenth Century rubber trade,
(though calling it ivory, for his personal safety). From that experience Conrad wrote, in
Heart of Darkness, through his character Kurtz, a most rational commentary about what
he found down his own particular rabbit hole:

23
 “The Horror! The Horror!”43
Ultimately, there is no reconciling this history to any greater good. I find
Responsibility the most useful and operative principal for those of us delving deeply into
this topic--for those of us who found what I have found. In short, we have a
responsibility to tell the truth; and without bravado.

Abstract
The historical value of this paper, beyond the usual narrative history, of which
there is plenty, lies in its analysis of primary sources from the English West Indies in the
mid to late-Seventeenth Century. Sources like: Richard Ligon, Father Antoine Biet,
Henry Drax, Christopher Codrington (the Younger), Thomas Thistlewood, Eloudah
Equiano and Mary Prince. It is also an exposition of the clash of cultures in this period of
laissez-faire mercantilism where ‘younger sons of younger sons’ vied for the newest and
most liquid of cash crops: sugar! It is one of securing their feudal authority, of piracy and
privateering on the high seas, of experimental practices leading to an almost
industrialized agriculture whose engine was slave power and the cost of which was the
lives of nearly every worker in the continual and relentless Caribbean growing season. It
is a grizzly history indeed. It requires careful treatment. Being a social history, the
author seeks to prove the normative statement that: Enslaved Africans who survived the
Middle Passage stepped off a boat and into hell-on-earth where Planter and enslaved
existed in a state of perpetual war with one another.

43
Joseph Conrad. Heart of Darkness and Selected Short Fiction. ed. George Stade. (New York: Barnes
and Noble Books, 2003), 115.

24
 Bibliography

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His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

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Massachusetts: The BelKnap Press of Harvard University, 2004) 105.

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York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

6. Curtis, L. “Great News from the Barbados or a Truthful Account of the Grand

Conspiracy 1676,” in Versions of Blackness: Key Texts on Slavery in the Seventeenth

Century, edited by Derek Hughes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009.

25
 7. Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the

English West Indies, 1624 -1713. Chapel Hill: Published by the Omohundro Institute of

Early American History and the University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

8. Edwards, Bryan; McKinnen, Daniel. The History, Civil and Commercial, of the

British Colonies in the West Indies Philadelphia: Printed and sold by J. Humphreys,

1805-1806.

9. Equiano, Olaudah. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or

Gustavus Vassa the African. Edited by Henry Louis Gates. New York: Penguin, 2002.

10. Gomez, Michael A. Reversing Sail: A History of the African Diaspora. New

York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

11. Handler, Jerome S. “Father Antoine Biet’s Visit to Barbados in 1654.” Journal

of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society no. 32 (1967): 69-89.

12. Ligon, Richard. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados / Richard

Ligon (1657) Edited with an Introduction by Karen Ordahl Kupperman.

Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 2011.

13. Lisser, Herbert G. de. The White Witch of Rose Hall (1929). Oxford:

Macmillan Caribbean, 2007.

14. Rugemer, Edward B. “The Development of Mastery and Race in the

Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean During the Seventeenth

Century. William & Mary Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2013): 429-58. dio:

10.5309/willmaryquar.70.3.0429

26
 15. Simmons, George C. “Towards a Biography of Christopher Codrington the

Younger.” Caribbean Studies 12, no. 1, (April, 1972): 32-50.

16. Thompson, Peter. "Henry Drax's Instructions on the Management of a

Seventeenth-Century Barbadian Sugar Plantation." The William and Mary Quarterly,

Third Series 66, no. 3 (2009): 565-604. http://0-

www.jstor.org.wizard.umd.umich.edu/stable/40467523.

27
 /////////////////////

End of Paper Notes and In-Text Citation

Black Codes or Laws (first conceived by the Barbadian Governing Council) were

meant to effectively racialize the slave system in the West Indies, maintain the status

quo, further the legal separation between enslaved Africans and white servants, and

give planters a visual distinction to go by for identification purposes. The the term Black

and White replaced Christian and African - Angolan, Gold Coast Negro or other forms of

description.

Reconfigured for Use in Footnotes or Notes

Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North

America. Cambridge, (Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1998), 242.

Trevor G. Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the

Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 216.

Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English

West Indies, 1624 -1713 (Chapel Hill: Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early

American History and the University of North Carolina Press, 2012), 331.

Bryan Edwards and Daniel McKinnen, “The History, Civil and Commercial, of the

British Colonies in the West Indies,” in Trevor G. Burnard’s, Mastery, Tyranny and

28
Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill:

University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 216.

Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano or

Gustavus Vassa the African, ed. Henry Louis Gates (New York: Penguin, 2002), 183.

Jerome S. Handler, “Father Antoine Biet’s Visit to Barbados in 1654.” Journal of

the Barbados Museum and Historical Society no. 32 (1967): 69-89.

Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados (1657), ed.

Karen Ordahl Kupperman (Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett, 2011), 26.

Herbert G. de Lisser, The White Witch of Rose Hall (1929) (Oxford: Macmillan

Caribbean, 2007), 71.

Edward B. Rugemer, “The Development of Mastery and Race in the

Comprehensive Slave Codes of the Greater Caribbean During the Seventeenth

Century,” William & Mary Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2013): 429-58. dio:

10.5309/willmaryquar.70.3.0429

George C. Simmons “Towards a Biography of Christopher Codrington the

Younger,” Caribbean Studies 12, no. 1 (Apr., 1972): 32-50.

Peter Thompson, "Henry Drax's Instructions on the Management of a

Seventeenth-Century Barbadian Sugar Plantation," The William and Mary Quarterly,

29
Third Series 66, no. 3 (2009): 565-604. http://0-

www.jstor.org.wizard.umd.umich.edu/stable/40467523.

30