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“A Civil Inconvenience”? The Vexed Question of Slave Marriage in the British West Indies

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  18 August 2010

Cecilia A. Green
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This article revisits the debates on the question of slave marriage that were carried on for roughly two centuries, both back and forth across the Atlantic and on the local terrain of the British West Indian plantation colonies. These debates came into critical focus during the fifty-year showdown over “amelioration,” which ended—though only in a manner of speaking—with the British Abolition Act of 1833. For a long time the lines were starkly drawn, but, in the context of laissez-faire political imperium or “indirect rule,” seldom tested. The metropolitan authorities felt some obligation to uphold the grand moral and civilizational integrity of the as-yet imperfectly imagined British Empire, as well as of Western Christendom. They, therefore, were inclined to see the slave as a species of imperial subject, still vaguely conceived within the emerging terms of reference of their global trusteeship and presumptive legal jurisdiction. They felt that, to honor the dignity of the latter, and sustain and nurture its moral legitimacy, the slaves—their subjects, ultimately—should be encouraged to marry, and their marriages should be formally marked, if only symbolically or by summary Christian rite. The planters, for their part, were unshaken in their certitude that the slaves were a species of property, their property no less, and that the idea of any kind of formal marriage among them was preposterous, a great impertinence, an attack on their authority and rights of property, a threat to public safety, and a dangerous intrusion upon the sacrosanctity of European racial exclusivity and superiority.

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Law and History Review , Volume 25 , Issue 1 , Spring 2007 , pp. 1 - 60
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Copyright © the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 2007

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References

1. Rev. John Stephen to Governor Charles Cameron, 2 May 1816, enclosed in Cameron to Earl Bathurst, 12 July 1816, British Parliamentary Papers: Slavery and the West Indies 1818–1823, Correspondence—Marriage of Slaves, 217–26. All subsequent quotes from Stephen are taken from this letter and pages will be identified accordingly. Emphases are in the original unless noted otherwise.

2. Attorney General Wylly, a key principal in the Stephen correspondence, was himself a slaveowner. In delivering his professional opinion he spoke in his official capacity and not as a planter. But, while by no means anti-slavery, he was not a typical planter. A reformist, he had incurred the enduring wrath of the slave-owning classes in the Bahamas by prosecuting some of the biggest owners among them for violations of the protective clauses of the 1797 ameliorated slave code of the Bahamas and the 1807 imperial statute abolishing the slave trade. He was a convert to Methodism and had adopted a policy of “paternalistic humanitarianism” with respect to his own slaves, designing for their benefit “a set of regulations which included more generous allotments than those provided by law, inducements and penalties to promote marriage and family life, and provision for baptism, regular church services, and Sunday schooling.” Craton, Michael and Saunders, Gail, Islanders in the Stream: A History of the Bahamian People (Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1992), 222Google Scholar.

Earl Bathurst was Secretary of State during a period of unprecedented shifts in the conduct of relations between British metropole and West Indian colony. These were primarily occasioned by the growing agitation for the amelioration of the status and living conditions of the enslaved and the debate over who should legislate and oversee the process. For two centuries what some took for granted as the “transcendent power of parliament to make laws for every part of the British empire” had lain dormant, partly because its exercise was regarded as impolitic with respect to duly vested British settlers and not conducive to the maintenance of trade and profit flows from the colonies, and partly because others, not least among them the colonists themselves, denied that such a power existed at all. Murray, D. J., The West Indies and the Development of Colonial Government, 1801–1834 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 2.Google Scholar In fact, Parliament had played little role in colonial administration. Laws passed by colonial legislatures were subject to royal assent and veto, but even those had often languished unexercised. In reviewing all the Antiguan legislation sent to Colonial Office between 1672 and 1900, one historian found fewer than a dozen bills disallowed by Great Britain. Lazarus-Black, Mindie, Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters: Law and Society in Antigua and Barbuda (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 20. See alsoGoogle ScholarSpurdle, Frederick G., Early West Indian Government (Palmerston North, N.Z.: 1962)Google Scholar for a general account of the system of colonial governance.

3. By the dawn of the nineteenth century, the laissez-faire policy of the past one hundred and fifty years was being reconsidered, and a new activist and interventionist approach to colonial governance was beginning to emerge. Bathurst's stewardship (1812–1827) of the relatively new institution of Colonial Office charted a careful course between the status quo with regard to the ancient prerogatives of planter assemblies and the growing pressure from the more radical abolitionist evangelicals in favor of direct intervention by Parliament and more activist oversight by the Crown on behalf of the enslaved. Bathurst rejected both the notion of West Indian legislative parity with the British Parliament, and hence immunity from the latter's interference (a conceit of the planter class), and abolitionist crusader James Stephen Sr.'s push for direct rule, or at least the imposition of metropolitan decisions on unwilling colonial legislatures. Bathurst's approach (and that of most British parliamentarians), one of reformist gradualism, was to try to persuade the West Indians to do the right thing and to act rationally in their own best interest. To that end, he continued to forward proposals, amendments, and orders-in-council for their legislative consideration and reconsideration in the hopes of a satisfactory amelioration settlement. He was satisfied that his way was the right way when he successfully persuaded the West Indian assemblies to pass slave registration and, later, a second round of amelioration laws of their own. But they did so kicking and screaming, always under the most vigorous protest, and, as far as they could, on their own terms. See Murray, , West Indies, esp. 89–108Google Scholar.

4. Craton and Saunders, Islanders in the Stream; Saunders, Gail, Slavery in the Bahamas, 1648–1838 (Nassau, Bahamas: The Nassau Guardian, 1985)Google Scholar; Johnson, Howard, The Bahamas in Slavery and Freedom (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers; London: James Currey Publishers, 1991)Google Scholar.

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8. The 1812 English Toleration Act, in line with earlier initiatives and “popularly known as the Grand Charter of the Dissenters,” guaranteed Dissenters the right to preach (Turner, , Slaves and Missionaries, 19)Google Scholar.

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11. Mills's work is concerned exclusively with the category of “race,” but it can easily accommodate sexualization and sexual differentiation as a dimension that is integral to the process of racialization or “racing,” as he prefers. Males predominated in the earlier stages of slavery, reflecting preferences of the planters in the slave trade. However, as enslaved populations became “creolized,” the sex ratio gradually evened out, and in mature creole populations, like those of Barbados and the Bahamas, women came to outnumber men. See Higman, B. W., Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1838 (Kingston, Jamaica: The Press University of the West Indies, 1995), 115–21Google Scholar.

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15. Barbados and Antigua were widely reputed to have more resident plantation owners than the other sugar islands, and whites outnumbered blacks in some of the Bahamian islands where the main plantation crop, cotton, was not grown. In 1810, whites comprised an estimated 16.7 and 22.8 percent of the populations of Barbados and the Bahamas respectively, while in most of the sugar islands they made up no more than 4–6 percent (Higman, , Slave Populations, table 4.2, 77).Google Scholar In Antigua, although the numbers were in keeping with the general profile, residential ownership was observed to be higher than elsewhere (Black, Lazarus-, Legitimate Acts and IIIegal Encounters, 97)Google Scholar.

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20. Narrated and quoted in Nugent, Maria, Lady Nugent's Journal of her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805, ed. Wright, P. (Kingston, Jamaica: Institute of Jamaica, 1966), 118Google Scholar.

21. Bathurst's strong and unequivocal pronouncement on the right of slaves to marry, made in the safe venue of non-binding consultative inter-office correspondence, was probably based on the proffered legal expertise of James Stephen Jr., Stephen Sr.'s son (and, later, drafter of the emancipation bill), whom Bathurst had appointed in 1813 as legal advisor to the Colonial Office. Stephen was an ardent abolitionist, several steps ahead of his superiors, who had already become an indispensable expert on and unrelenting critic of colonial, especially West Indian, legislation. The pronouncement was very much in keeping with the Stephen father-son—or liberal-imperial—tradition, one which argued for both direct colonial rule, as part of an unquestioning faith in the righteous global stewardship of Great Britain and Western Christendom, and the application of the same (superlatively rational) civil and ecclesiastical laws, in equal measure to all classes of colonial subject, as applied to freeborn Britons at home. The minute signed by Bathurst was a pronouncement by stealth, which, had it seen the light of day, would never have gone unchallenged by local planter classes, who felt that the enjoyment of British civil (or related ecclesiastical) law was their exclusive birthright and that they alone, as owners, could determine the status of their slaves. After all, they repeatedly protested, they had been led to believe these very things by the words and acts of Great Britain herself. See Smandych, Russell, “To Soften the Extreme Rigor of Their Bondage: James Stephen's Attempt to Reform the Criminal Slave Laws of the West Indies, 1813–1833,” Law and History Review 23 (2006): 538–88Google Scholar.

22. Earl Bathurst to Governor Cameron, 31 November 1816, Brit. Parl. Papers, 1818–1823, 227, emphasis added.

23. Bathurst to Cameron, 227.

24. Wylly to Cameron, 10 March 1817, enclosed in Cameron to Earl Bathurst, 10 March 1817, 228.

25. William Vesey Munnings, Peter Edwards, and John McCartney to Cameron, 6 March 1817, enclosed in Cameron to Bathurst, 10 March 1817.

26. Stephen had made reference to 32d Henry VIII. chap. 38, where it is declared that “all persons may lawfully marry, but such as are forbidden by God's law, &c. and that nothing (God's law excepted) shall impeach any marriage but within the Levitical degrees.” His point was to show that this ruling applied at a time when “slavery” (villeinage) had not yet been abolished in England. Stephen to Cameron, 221.

27. Emphases in original. Hargrave, Francis, An Argument in the Case of James Sommersett, a Negro, lately determined by the Court of King's Bench [etc] (London: Printed for the Author, and sold by W. Otridge, 1772), 32–33.Google Scholar See the recent book by Steven M. Wise, giving a lively and well-researched account of the case. Wise, Steven M., Though the Heavens May Fall: The Landmark Trial That Led to the End of Human Slavery (Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press, 2005)Google Scholar.

28. Hargrave, , An Argument, 32Google Scholar.

29. Even after the abolition of the slave trade, the colonial contract, symbolized by the Navigation Acts, directly implicated Britons in the slavery of their colonies; and even after the abolition of slavery in their colonies, free trade (which they claimed to be anti-colonial) allowed them to buy and sell the slave-cultivated and -processed produce of the colonies of others. Always, between British freedom and West Indian post/slavery was the colonial contract. See Wise, Though the Heavens May Fall, for a dramatic illustration of the contradictory implications and ramifications of the Somerset ruling.

30. Address of the Legislative Council of Tobago to His Excellency Lieutenant General Sir Frederick Philipse Robinson (October 28, 1825). The Chronicle (Roseau, Dominica), December 28, 1825Google ScholarPubMed.

31. The reasons have to do with the prevalence of non-plantation slavery, the smaller scale, milder conditions, and early decline of cotton plantation slavery, the circumstances of the Loyalist influx, and, although patterns differed from island to island, the demographic structure, featuring an overall black-to-white ratio that was considerably lower than the British Caribbean average. See Craton, and Saunders, , Islanders in the Stream, esp. 258–96Google Scholar.

32. Manyoni refers to the Stephen correspondence as well. In fact, it was my own encounter with that correspondence in its entirety while doing research at the Public Record Office in London in 2002 that led me to return to Manyoni's article, which I had read earlier. Manyoni, Joseph R., “Extra-Marital Mating Patterns in Caribbean Family Studies: A Methodological Excursus,” Anthropologica 22.1 (1980): 85–118,CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed esp. 93–94.

33. Bennett, J. Harry Jr, Bondsmen and Bishops: Slavery and Apprenticeship on the Codrington Plantations of Barbados, 1710–1838 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1958), 116Google Scholar.

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35. Sturge, Joseph and Harvey, Thomas, The West Indies in 1837 (1838; reprint, London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1968),Google Scholar appendix, section XII, lxxxviii (page citations are to the reprint edition).

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43. It is seldom appreciated that Adam Smith made a closely related observation. He said that “the freer the people the more miserable are the slaves; in a democracy they are more miserable than in any other. The greater the freedom of the free, the more intollerable is the slavery of the slaves.” Smith, Adam, Lectures on Jurispriudence, ed. Meek, Ronald L., Raphael, D. D., and Stein, Peter G. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982), 111. See alsoGoogle ScholarCottrol, Robert J., “The Long Lingering Shadow: Law, Liberalism, and Cultures of Racial Hierarchy and Identity in the Americas,” Tulane Law Review 76.1 (2001): 11–79Google Scholar.

44. See Goveia, “West Indian Slave Laws,” and Watson, Alan, Slave Law in the Americas (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1989)Google Scholar.

45. Cottrol, , “Long Lingering Shadow,” esp. 40–61.Google Scholar The reference here is to the wellknown classic, Tannenbaum, Frank, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Vintage Books, 1946)Google Scholar.

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47. Quoted in Murray, , West Indies, 77Google Scholar.

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52. Bathurst to Cameron. Emphasis added.

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56. Was Stephen once more technically correct in this view? In fact, villeins were not slaves, though their condition may have evolved remotely from the vastly eroded legacy of Roman slavery. The strata that made up the oppressed polarity of this seigneurial system were thus subject to personal bondage, epitomized by serfdom, and/or alien paramount “ownership” of the land which they held and worked, as tenants, in the form of family estates, a customary relation of tenure known as villeinage. Strictly speaking the two principles were not necessarily coterminous: not all villeins or tenant-farmers were serfs or bondmen/women in a formal, juridical sense. Furthermore, not all peasants were villeins; a few were allodial landholders or free-holders, enjoying outright and independent ownership of their plots. Indeed, allodial landholders counted serfs among their numbers. A major difference between freeholders or quasi-freeholders and villeins was that the former were not subject to the obligations of labor service generally owed the lord by the latter as a condition of land tenure. They could, however, be subject to various dues and taxes in cash or in kind. By 1300 in England, villeinage had come to unitarily incorporate the characteristics of serfdom so that the terms “villein” and “serf” were used interchangeably, and the richer peasants who held land in villeinage but did not owe labor-services ceased, as befitted their status, to be regarded as villeins. See Bloch, Marc, Feudal Society, trans. Manyon, L. A. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), 270–73;Google ScholarLand and Work in Mediaeval Europe, trans. Anderson, J. E. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 59–61;Google ScholarSlavery and Serfdom in the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 91.Google Scholar According to Bloch, the obligations of serfdom “were, in one sense, at the opposite pole from slavery, since they were based on the assumption that the person liable to them possessed a genuine patrimony” (Feudal Society, 263). He states elsewhere, “Within certain limits he [sic] was the master of his person and property. In principle he could marry within his own group according to his wish … ” (Slavery and Serfdom, 61). We can safely agree then that villeins were not free (neither were they slaves), but they enjoyed many aspects of concrete relative freedom, in the British and European sense, that later becomes transmogrified and fictionalized into an absolute but abstract juridical property of free-standing individuals. Those aspects of concrete relative freedom included possession or ownership of patrimonium or real property, patriarchal power or its protection, and relative marital, reproductive, and family autonomy. Stephen to Cameron, 222.

57. In English common law, a “person who could claim only mother's blood was classified with two other groups of outcast persons…who also lacked ‘inheritable blood’: aliens and felons” (Lazarus-Black, , Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters, 60)Google Scholar.

58. See Green, Cecilia, “Gender and Re/production in British West Indian Slave Societies,” Against the Current 7.4 (Sept./Oct. 1992): 31–38;Google Scholar 7.5 (Nov./Dec. 1992), 26–31; 7.6 (Jan./Feb. 1993), 29–36. The concept of “re/production” used in this earlier examination of enslaved women's historically constructed status in British West Indian formations is an elliptical and combined rendering of (goods) production and (human) reproduction as the key sites of social practices and relations upon which this construction takes place.

59. Burnham, Margaret A., “An Impossible Marriage: Slave Law and Family Law,” Law and Inequality: A Journal of Theory and Practice 5 (1987): 187–225,Google Scholar esp. citation on 187; and Cousins, Winifred M., “Slave Family Life in the British Colonies: 1800–1834,” The Sociological Review 27.1 (1935), 35–55,Google Scholar esp. 37.

60. Attorney General William Wylly to Governor Cameron, 10 March 1817, enclosed in Cameron to Earl Bathurst, 10 March 1817, Brit. Parl. Papers, 1818–1823, 228.

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63. As Steinfeld put it, “Wage and contract labor were merely variations on a common regime of contract,” so that “[f]reedom of contract implied that workers should not be constrained to enter only revocable agreements but should be free to bind their labor irrevocably as well.” Steinfeld, Robert J., Coercion, Contract, and Free Labor in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 9.Google Scholar Thus freedom of contract gave white servants the right to sign contracts which were not terminable at will. It should be noted that villeinage had ceased to exist as a system in England by the time colonial settlement of the West Indies and North America took off in the first half of the seventeenth century. However, various kinds of property rights in (other white) persons, not technically incompatible with freedom of contract, persisted and continued to be deployed in both Britain and the colonies. See also Steinfeld, Robert J., The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991)Google Scholar.

64. Lazarus-Black, , Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters, 60–67Google Scholar.

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66. For example, on Sunday, September 29, 1752, Thistlewood recorded news of an apparently unsuccessful local uprising: “Heard of a white man and the Negroes rising upon Capt. Leister. He afterwards told me the story himself.” Hall, Douglas, In Miserable Slavery: Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica, 1750–86 (Kingston, Jamaica: The University of the West Indies Press, 1999), 31Google Scholar.

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68. A direct quote might help readers to understand: “…And also [if] any free person intermarry with a servant without consent of his or her Master, or Mistress, shall pay twenty pounds current Money to the Owner of such Servant for his or her freedom, or serve two years time to the said Master or Mistress. And if the Servant married be a tradesman, then the penalty herein required to be double, or the time, and that at the election of the Master or Mistress of the Servant.” Quoted in Lazarus-Black, , Legitimate Acts and IIIegal Encounters, 63Google Scholar.

69. Ibid., 37.

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76. Shepherd, Verene, “Gender, Migration and Settlement: The Indentureship and Postindentureship Experience of Indian Females in Jamaica, 1845–1943,” in Engendering History, 233–57, esp. 236Google Scholar.

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78. Bennett, , Bondsmen and Bishops, 91Google Scholar.

79. Ibid., 98–99.

80. Quoted in ibid., 94.

81. Bennett, , Bondsmen and Bishops, 91Google Scholar.

82. Ibid.

83. Jamaica and the Windward Island group were the most prominent “home-fed” and “slave-fed” islands. Barbadian planters were unusual in adopting the (unevenly applied) strategy of centralized plantation-grown domestic food crops, while Antigua was more clearly a “foreign-fed” island. It depended primarily on the topography of the island, but even where there was a scarcity of non-plantation land slaves cultivated small kitchen gardens around their cottages. See Higman, , Slave Populations, 204–18Google Scholar.

84. In the post-emancipation period, a new system of oppression emerges when these plantation-based socialized services are withdrawn, and (a) the state fails to take up the slack, and (b) truncated family structures prove particularly incapable of absorbing the additional, unremunerated labor services called for, especially as most women are forced to prioritize paid work to support themselves and their children. See Holt, The Problem of Freedom; Brereton, Bridget, “Family Strategies, Gender, and the Shift to Wage Labour in the British Caribbean,” in The Colonial Caribbean in Transition: Essays on Postemancipation Social and Cultural History, ed. Brereton, Bridget and Yelvington, Kevin A. (Kingston, Jamaica: Press University of the West Indies; Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999), 77–107Google Scholar.

85. But for details of the punishments incurred by such slaves, Thomas Thistlewood's eighteenth-century diary is probably the best source. See Hall, In Miserable Slavery, passim.

86. See Manyoni, , “Extra-Marital Mating Patterns,” 102Google Scholar.

87. See Sudarkasa, Niara, The Strength of Our Mothers: African & African American Women & Families: Essays and Speeches (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1996), esp. 77–87,Google Scholar 123–141. See also the two main protagonists of the Africa/slavery debate: Herskovits, Melville J., The Myth of the Negro Past (1941; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 1958); andGoogle ScholarFrazier, Franklin E., The Negro Family in the United States (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1939Google Scholar; rev. and abridged ed., 1968).

88. Sudarkasa, , The Strength of Our Mothers, 85Google Scholar.

89. See Sudarkasa, Niara, “The ‘Status of Women’ in Indigenous African Societies,” in Women in Africa and the African Diaspora, ed. Terborg-Penn, R., Harley, S., and Rushing, A. Benton (Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

90. Both monogamy and polygamy were modified by conditions of slavery and African retentions. For example, the conditions of plantation slavery, helped by the ease of divorce in many West African cultures, facilitated new traditions of serial monogamy. Also, cut off from the context of corporate kinship in which it was embedded in many parts of West Africa—with its carefully and collectively organized senior/junior relations, paced “exchange of women,” relations of co-wifehood and co—motherhood, and so on—polygyny seemed to have radically contracted and shifted into an “elite” and individualized mode, especially in the earlier conditions of scarcity of women and general male disempowerment among the enslaved.

91. See Green, , “Gender and Re/production,” 7.6, esp. 29–32Google Scholar.

92. Higman, B. W., “Household Structure and Fertility on Jamaican Slave Plantations: A Nineteenth-century Example,” Population Studies 27.3 (1973), 527–50,Google Scholar esp. 528; also, “The Slave Family and Household in the British West Indies, 1800–1834,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6.2 (1975): 261–87Google Scholar.

93. See Higman, , Slave Populations, tables 2.2Google Scholar and 2.3, 12–13.

94. Mrs. Carmichael, , Domestic Manners and Social Condition of the White, Coloured, and Negro Population of the West Indies (1833; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 1:174Google Scholar (page citations are to the reprint edition).

95. Quoted in Marshall, Woodville K., “Provision Ground and Plantation Labour in Four Windward Islands: Competition for Resources during Slavery,” Slavery & Abolition 12.1 (1991): 48–67,CrossRefGoogle Scholar esp. 52.

96. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, Peasants and Capital: Dominica in the World Economy (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 74Google Scholar.

97. Ibid., 75.

98. Tomich, Dale W., “The Other Face of Slave Labor: Provision Grounds and Internal Marketing in Martinique,” in Caribbean Slave Society and Economy, ed. Beckles, H. and Shepherd, V. (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Publishers; London: James Currey Publishers, 1991), 72Google Scholar.

99. Emphasis added. Dominica, , “An Act for regulating the government and conduct of Slaves, and for their more effectual protection, encouragement, and the general amelioration of their condition. 2d June 1821,” in Slaves: Treatment of Slaves in the Colonies, House of Commons, 23 March 1834Google Scholar.

100. Smith, “Hierarchy and the Dual Marriage System.”

101. See Alexander, Jack, “Love, Race, Slavery, and Sexuality in Jamaican Images of the Family,” in Kinship Ideology and Practice in Latin America, ed. Smith, R. T. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Smith, Raymond T., Kinship and Class in the West Indies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)Google Scholar; Austin, Diane J., “History and Symbols in Ideology: A Jamaican Example,” Man, n.s. 14 (1979): 497–514Google Scholar.

102. Phibbah was Thistlewood's slave “wife.” See Hall, In Miserable Slavery; and Burnard, Trevor, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004)Google Scholar.

103. Altink, Henrice, “‘To Wed or Not to Wed?’: The Struggle to Define Afro-Jamaican Relationships, 1834–1838,” Journal of Social History 38 (Fall 2004): 81–111,CrossRefGoogle Scholar esp. 86–7.

104. See Hall, In Miserable Slavery, passim; and Burnard, , Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, 137–240Google Scholar.

105. “Elite” male slaves included skilled artisans and drivers or headmen.

106. Quoted in Melanie Newton, , “‘New Ideas of Correctness’: Gender, Amelioration and Emancipation in Barbados, 1810s–50s,” Slavery and Abolition 21.3 (December 2000): 94–124,CrossRefGoogle Scholar esp. 111.

107. Burnham's is, in my opinion, the single best article on the legal and moral conundrums surrounding slave marriage in the U.S. I have been much indebted to her for my earlier conceptualizations of the British West Indian case. Burnham, , “an Impossible Marriage,” 212, 222.Google Scholar See also excellent books by Bush, Barbara, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Beckles, Hilary McD., Natural Rebels (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1989)Google Scholar; Beckles, Hilary McD., Centering Woman: Gender Discourse in Caribbean Slave Society (Kingston: Ian Randle Publishers; Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers; Oxford: James Currey Publishers, 1999)Google Scholar.

108. Quoted in Bennett, , Bondsmen and Bishops, 35Google Scholar.

109. Mrs. Carmichael, , Domestic Manners, 2:237Google Scholar.

110. See Carmichael, , Domestic Manners, esp. 2:181–86.Google Scholar Mrs. Carmichael presents herself as both an unreconstructed apologist for slavery and the planter class and a keen observer of plantation society and the lives of the enslaved.

111. See Lewis, M. G., Journal of a West India Proprietor; Kept during a Residence in the Island of Jamaica, with an introduction and notes by Terry, Judith, editor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999Google Scholar; originally published London: J. Murray, 1834); Carmichael, Domestic Manners; Waddell, Twenty-Nine Years.

112. See Turner, Slaves and Missionaries; Buchner, J. H., The Moravians in Jamaica (1854; reprint, Freeport, New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1971)Google Scholar; Waddell, Twenty-Nine Years; Hall, Civilising Subjects.

113. Quoted in Bennett, , Bondsmen and Bishops, 117Google Scholar.

114. Buchner, , Moravians in Jamaica, 45Google Scholar (page citations are to the reprint edition). However, the second regulation forbade them to “appoint such a man to be a helper or servant in the church” (ibid.).

115. Marriages performed by dissenting ministers were seen as binding within the church but had no standing in the law of the land, on the basis of both the slaves' own legal incapacity and the dissenting ministers' lack of legal authority to perform marriages. Buchner, , Moravians in Jamaica, 45Google Scholar.

116. The special sanctioning of the polygynous households of elite male slaves was a somewhat different matter.

117. See Altink, “‘To Wed or Not to Wed.’”

118. Leeward Islands Act No. 36, vol. 1., The Laws of the Island of Antigua Consisting of the Acts of the Leeward Islands, 1690–1798, and Acts of Antigua, 1668–1845 (London: Samuel Bagster, 1805–1846)Google Scholar.

119. Kean Osborn, Spanish Town, Jamaica, to Nathaniel Phillips, London, 5 December 1790, MS. 1966, Clare Taylor Collection: Slebech Papers, National Library of Jamaica.

120. This is a reference to a special statute in Jamaica by which free colored individuals were allowed to petition the Assembly (or to have someone petition the Assembly on their behalf) for “special privileges” that would render them legally white, thereby conferring upon them an approximation of the whole bundle of rights and obligations that came with free white status. This “special privileges” statute was peculiar to Jamaica among the British islands. See Heuman, Gad J., Between Black and White: Race, Politics, and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica, 1792–1865 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981), 6Google Scholar.

121. Burnham, , “An Impossible Marriage,” 221–22Google Scholar.

122. Beckles, , Natural Rebels, 142–43Google Scholar.

123. Altink, , “‘To Wed or Not to Wed,’” 87Google Scholar.

124. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the demographic disaster of slavery had been completely reversed, the high birthrate was accompanied by a high infant mortality rate, which was again blamed on black women's immorality. See Richardson, Bonham C., Panama Money in Barbados, 1900–1920 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985), 77–80Google Scholar.

125. See Hall, , In Miserable Slavery, 50Google Scholar.

126. Quoted in Newton, , “‘New Ideas of Correctness,’” 113Google Scholar.

127. Mills, The Racial Contract.

128. See Olivier, Sydney, Jamaica, the Blessed Island (1936; reprint, New York: Russell & Russell, 1971); andGoogle ScholarPhillippo, James M., Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (1843; reprint, Westport, Conn.: Negro Universities Press, 1970)Google Scholar.

129. Besson, Jean, “Reputation and Respectability Reconsidered: A New Perspective on Afro-Caribbean Peasant Women,” in Women and Change in the Caribbean, ed. Momsen, J. H. (Kingston: Ian Randle; Bloomington: Indiana University Press; London: James Currey, 1993), 15–37Google Scholar.