Part 4 (1/2)
[Footnote 7: Edward Long, _History of Jamaica_, I, 494, Bryan Edwards, _History of the British Colonies in the West Indies_, book II, appendix.]
When the final enumeration of slaves in the British possessions was made in the eighteen-thirties there were no single Jamaica holdings reported as large as that of 1598 slaves held by James Blair in Guiana; but occasional items were of a scale ranging from five to eight hundred each, and hundreds numbered above one hundred each. In many of these instances the same persons are listed as possessing several holdings, with Sir Edward Hyde East particularly notable for the large number of his great squads. The degree of absenteeism is indicated by the frequency of English n.o.bles, knights and gentlemen among the large proprietors. Thus the Earl of Balcarres had 474 slaves; the Earl of Harwood 232; the Earl and Countess of Airlie 59; Earl Talbot and Lord Shelborne jointly 79; Lord Seaford 70; Lord Hatherton jointly with Francis Downing, John Benbow and the Right Reverend H. Philpots, Lord Bishop of Exeter, two holdings of 304 and 236 slaves each; and the three Gladstones, Thomas, William and Robert 468 slaves jointly.[8]
[Footnote 8: ”Accounts of Slave Compensation Claims,” in the British official _Account: and Papers, 1837-1838_, vol. XLVIII.]
Such an average scale and such a prevalence of absenteeism never prevailed in any other Anglo-American plantation community, largely because none of the other staples required so much manufacturing as sugar did in preparing the crops for market. As Bryan Edwards wrote in 1793: ”the business of sugar planting is a sort of adventure in which the man that engages must engage deeply.... It requires a capital of no less than thirty thousand pounds sterling to embark in this employment with a fair prospect of success.” Such an investment, he particularized, would procure and establish as a going concern a plantation of 300 acres in cane and 100 acres each in provision crops, forage and woodland, together with the appropriate buildings and apparatus, and a working force of 80 steers, 60 mules and 250 slaves, at the current price for these last of 50 sterling a head.[9] So distinctly were the plantations regarded as capitalistic ventures that they came to be among the chief speculations of their time for absentee investors.
[Footnote 9: Bryan Edwards, _History of the West Indies_, book 5, chap. 3.]
When Lord Chesterfield tried in 1767 to buy his son a seat in Parliament he learned ”that there was no such thing as a borough to be had now, for that the rich East and West Indians had secured them all at the rate of three thousand pounds at the least.”[10] And an Englishman after traveling in the French and British Antilles in 1825 wrote: ”The French colonists, whether Creoles or Europeans, consider the West Indies as their country; they cast no wistful looks toward France.... In our colonies it is quite different; ... every one regards the colony as a temporary lodging place where they must sojourn in sugar and mola.s.ses till their mortgages will let them live elsewhere. They call England their home though many of them have never been there.... The French colonist deliberately expatriates himself; the Englishman never.”[11] Absenteeism was throughout a serious detriment. Many and perhaps most of the Jamaica proprietors were living luxuriously in England instead of industriously on their estates. One of them, the talented author ”Monk” Lewis, when he visited his own plantation in 1815-1817, near the end of his life, found as much novelty in the doings of his slaves as if he had been drawing his income from shares in the Banc of England; but even he, while noting their clamorous good nature was chiefly impressed by their indolence and perversity.[12] It was left for an invalid traveling for his health to remark most vividly the human equation: ”The negroes cannot be silent; they talk in spite of themselves. Every pa.s.sion acts upon them with strange intensity, their anger is sudden and furious, their mirth clamorous and excessive, their curiosity audacious, and their love the sheer demand for gratification of an ardent animal desire. Yet by their nature they are good-humored in the highest degree, and I know nothing more delightful than to be met by a group of negro girls and to be saluted with their kind 'How d'ye ma.s.sa? how d'ye ma.s.sa?'”[13]
[Footnote 10: Lord Chesterfield, _Letters to his Son_ (London, 1774), II, 525.]
[Footnote 11: H.N. Coleridge, _Six Months in the West Indies_, 4th ed.
(London, 1832), pp. 131, 132.]
[Footnote 12: Matthew G. Lewis, _Journal of a West Indian Proprietor, kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica_ (London, 1834).]
[Footnote 13: H.N. Coleridge, p. 76.]
On the generality of the plantations the tone of the management was too much like that in most modern factories. The laborers were considered more as work-units than as men, women and children. Kindliness and comfort, cruelty and hards.h.i.+p, were rated at balance-sheet value; births and deaths were reckoned in profit and loss, and the expense of rearing children was balanced against the cost of new Africans. These things were true in some degree in the North American slaveholding communities, but in the West Indies they excelled.
In buying new negroes a practical planter having a preference for those of some particular tribal stock might make sure of getting them only by taking with him to the slave s.h.i.+ps or the ”Guinea yards” in the island ports a slave of the stock wanted and having him interrogate those for sale in his native language to learn whether they were in fact what the dealers declared them to be. Shrewdness was even more necessary to circ.u.mvent other tricks of the trade, especially that of fattening up, shaving and oiling the skins of adult slaves to pa.s.s them off as youthful. The ages most desired in purchasing were between fifteen and twenty-five years. If these were not to be had well grown children were preferable to the middle-aged, since they were much less apt to die in the ”seasoning,” they would learn English readily, and their service would increase instead of decreasing after the lapse of the first few years.
The conversion of new negroes into plantation laborers, a process called ”breaking in,” required always a mingling of delicacy and firmness. Some planters distributed their new purchases among the seasoned households, thus delegating the task largely to the veteran slaves. Others housed and tended them separately under the charge of a select staff of nurses and guardians and with frequent inspection from headquarters. The mortality rate was generally high under either plan, ranging usually from twenty to thirty per cent, in the seasoning period of three or four years. The deaths came from diseases brought from Africa, such as the yaws which was similar to syphilis; from debilities and maladies acquired on the voyage; from the change of climate and food; from exposure incurred in running away; from morbid habits such as dirt-eating; and from accident, manslaughter and suicide.[14]
[Footnote 14: Long, _Jamaica_, II, 435; Edwards, _West Indies_, book 4, chap. 5; A Professional Planter, _Rules_, chap. 2; Thomas Roughley, _Jamaica Planter's Guide_ (London, 1823), pp. 118-120.]
The seasoned slaves were housed by families in separate huts grouped into ”quarters,” and were generally a.s.signed small tracts on the outskirts of the plantation on which to raise their own provision crops. Allowances of clothing, dried fish, mola.s.ses, rum, salt, etc., were issued them from the commissary, together with any other provisions needed to supplement their own produce. The field force of men and women, boys and girls was generally divided according to strength into three gangs, with special details for the mill, the coppers and the still when needed; and permanent corps were a.s.signed to the handicrafts, to domestic service and to various incidental functions. The larger the plantation, of course, the greater the opportunity of differentiating tasks and a.s.signing individual slaves to employments fitted to their special apt.i.tudes.
The planters put such emphasis upon the regularity and vigor of the routine that they generally neglected other equally vital things. They ignored the value of labor-saving devices, most of them even shunning so obviously desirable an implement as the plough and using the hoe alone in breaking the land and cultivating the crops. But still more serious was the pa.s.sive acquiescence in the depletion of their slaves by excess of deaths over births. This decrease amounted to a veritable decimation, requiring the frequent importation of recruits to keep the ranks full. Long estimated this loss at about two per cent. annually, while Edwards reckoned that in his day there were surviving in Jamaica little more than one-third as many negroes as had been imported in the preceding career of the colony.[15] The staggering mortality rate among the new negroes goes far toward accounting for this; but even the seasoned groups generally failed to keep up their numbers. The birth rate was notoriously small; but the chief secret of the situation appears to have lain in the poor care of the newborn children. A surgeon of long experience said that a third of the babies died in their first month, and that few of the imported women bore children; and another veteran resident said that commonly more than a quarter of the babies died within the first nine days, of ”jaw-fall,” and nearly another fourth before they pa.s.sed their second year.[16] At least one public-spirited planter advocated in 1801 the heroic measure of closing the slave trade in order to raise the price of labor and coerce the planters into saving it both by improving their apparatus and by diminis.h.i.+ng the death rate.[17] But his fellows would have none of his policy.
[Footnote 15: Long, III, 432; Edwards, book 4, chap. 2.]
[Footnote 16: _Abridgement of the evidence taken before a committee of the whole House: The Slave Trade_, no. 2 (London, 1790), pp. 48, 80.]
[Footnote 17: Clement Caines, _Letters on the Cultivation of the Otaheite Cane_ (London, 1801), pp. 274-281.]
While in the other plantation staples the crop was planted and reaped in a single year, sugar cane had a cycle extending through several years. A typical field in southside Jamaica would be ”holed” or laid off in furrows between March and June, planted in the height of the rainy season between July and September, cultivated for fifteen months, and harvested in the first half of the second year after its planting. Then when the rains returned new shoots, ”rattoons,” would sprout from the old roots to yield a second though diminished harvest in the following spring, and so on for several years more until the rattoon or ”stubble” yield became too small to be worth while. The period of profitable rattooning ran in some specially favorable districts as high as fourteen years, but in general a field was replanted after the fourth crop. In such case the cycles of the several fields were so arranged on any well managed estate that one-fifth of the area in cane was replanted each year and four-fifths harvested.
This coordination of cycles brought it about that oftentimes almost every sort of work on the plantation was going on simultaneously. Thus on the Lodge and Grange plantations which were apparently operated as a single unit, the extant journal of work during the harvest month of May, 1801,[18]
shows a distribution of the total of 314 slaves as follows: ninety of the ”big gang” and fourteen of the ”big gang feeble” together with fifty of the ”little gang” were stumping a new clearing, ”holing” or laying off a stubble field for replanting, weeding and filling the gaps in the field of young first-year or ”plant” cane, and heaping the manure in the ox-lot; ten slaves were cutting, ten tying and ten more hauling the cane from the fields in harvest; fifteen were in a ”top heap” squad whose work was conjecturally the saving of the green cane tops for forage and fertilizer; nine were tending the cane mill, seven were in the boiling house, producing a hogshead and a half of sugar daily, and two were at the two stills making a puncheon of rum every four days; six watchmen and fence menders, twelve artisans, eight stockminders, two hunters, four domestics, and two sick nurses were at their appointed tasks; and eighteen invalids and pregnant women, four disabled with sores, forty infants and one runaway were doing no work. There were listed thirty horses, forty mules and a hundred oxen and other cattle; but no item indicates that a single plow was in use.
[Footnote 18: Printed by Clement Caines in a table facing p. 246 of his _Letters_.]
The cane-mill in the eighteenth century consisted merely of three iron-sheathed cylinders, two of them set against the third, turned by wind, water or cattle. The canes, tied into small bundles for greater compression, were given a double squeezing while pa.s.sing through the mill.
The juice expressed found its way through a trough into the boiling house while the flattened stalks, called mill trash or mega.s.s in the British colonies and baga.s.se in Louisiana, were carried to sheds and left to dry for later use as fuel under the coppers and stills.
In the boiling house the cane-juice flowed first into a large receptacle, the clarifier, where by treatment with lime and moderate heat it was separated from its grosser impurities. It then pa.s.sed into the first or great copper, where evaporation by boiling began and some further impurities, rising in sc.u.m, were taken off. After further evaporation in smaller coppers the thickened fluid was ladled into a final copper, the teache, for a last boiling and concentration; and when the product of the teache was ready for crystallization it was carried away for the curing. In Louisiana the successive caldrons were called the grande, the propre, the flambeau and the batterie, the last of these corresponding to the Jamaican teache.
The curing house was merely a timber framework with a roof above and a great shallow sloping vat below. The sugary syrup from the teache was generally potted directly into hogsheads resting on the timbers, and allowed to cool with occasional stirrings. Most of the sugar stayed in the hogsheads, while some of it trickled with the mother liquor, mola.s.ses, through perforations in the bottoms into the vat beneath. When the hogsheads were full of the crudely cured, moist, and impure ”muscovado”