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ABSTRACT
Slave registers are a major source for the study of British colonial slavery in its final two decades, yet they have been little used by historians. The article employs two case studies to show how these records allow us to reconstruct a collective profile of the enslaved and to sketch fuller portraits of individual persons. The first is James Blair’s Blairmont estate in Berbice, where slave registration records provide valuable insight into family structures. The second case study considers John Gladstone’s Success estate on neighbouring Demerara, epicentre of a major slave revolt in 1823. Here registers, correlated with other sources, yield a fuller picture of the insurgents and enable us to place them in the foreground of the story. We conclude that slave registration records can be used for purposes for which they were never intended, to write richer histories of people and place in the British Caribbean.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 B.W. Higman, Slave Populations of the British Caribbean, 1807–1834 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 74.
2 Higman, Slave Populations, 73.
3 HIgman, Slave Populations, 417–8.
4 J.R. Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750-1834: The Process of Amelioration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988).
5 Higman, Slave Populations, 6–11.
6 Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe 12 (2008): 1–14, quotation at 2.
7 Jennifer Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021), 20, 6. See also Marisa Fuentes, Disposessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), and Jessica Johnson, ‘Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads’, Social Text 36 (2018): 57–79.
8 Hazel V. Carby, Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (London: Verso, 2019), 198. See also Hazel V. Carby, ‘The National Archives’, InVisible Culture, 31 (2020): https://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/the-national-archives/.
9 Carby, Imperial Intimacies, 205.
10 Carby, Imperial Intimacies, 181.
11 Carby, Imperial Intimacies, 204–34.
12 Carby, Imperial Intimacies, 205: ‘The [Jamaican] Assembly had reluctantly bowed to pressure from abolitionists … ’.
13 James Stephen, Reasons for Establishing a Registry of Slaves in the British Colonies (1816), 41, 1–2.
14 Brief Remarks on the Slave Registry Bill (1816), and A Letter to the Members of the Imperial Parliament … By a Colonist (1816); David Lambert, White Creole Culture, Politics and Identity during the Age of Abolition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), ch. 4.
15 Brief Remarks, 11.
16 Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 68.
17 Bernard Martin and Mark Spurrell, eds., The Journal of a Slave Trader (John Newton), 1750-1754 (London: Epworth Press, 1962).
18 On the naming practices of managers see Trevor Burnard, ‘Slave Naming Patterns: Onomastics and the Taxonomy of Race in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 31 (2001), 325–46. On the use of plantation inventories to reassess naming practices, see Margaret Williamson, ‘Africa or Old Rome? Jamaican Slave Naming Revisited’, Slavery and Abolition 38 (2017), 117–34.
19 Morgan, Reckoning with Slavery, 23.
20 G.W. Roberts, ‘A Life Table for a West Indian Slave Population’, Population Studies 5 (1952): 238–43; idem, ‘Movements in Slave Populations of the Caribbean during the Period of Slave Registration’, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 292 (1977), 145–60; A. Meredith John, The Plantation Slaves of Trinidad: A Mathematical and Demographical Enquiry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Higman, Slave Populations.
21 Valuable Lives: Black Unfreedom and the Collapse of Slavery in Jamaica | History – UCL – University College London.
22 B.W. Higman, Montpelier: A Plantation Community in Slavery and Freedom, 1739–1812 (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 1998); Richard S. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014).
23 David Alston, Slaves and Highlanders: Silenced Histories of Scotland and the Caribbean (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021), ch. 8.
24 In addition to enslaved populations in the West Indies, there were enslaved populations in the British colonies of Mauritius and the Cape of Good Hope.
25 Kit Candlin, The Last Caribbean Frontier, 1795–1815 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012); Randy Browne, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia; University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
26 James Blair received £83,530.44 for his 1,598 enslaved people on his Blairmount properties and John Gladstone received £105,783.77 for properties in Demerara and Jamaica, including £22.274.93 for 429 enslaved people on Success. Legacies of British Slavery (ucl.ac.uk)
27 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Randy Browne, Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
28 Emilia Viotti da Costa Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Browne, Surviving Slavery; Trevor Burnard, ‘“I Know I have to Work”: The Moral Economy of Labor among Enslaved Women in Berbice, 1819-34’, in Hearing Enslaved Voices: African and Indian Slave Testimony in British and French America, 1700–1848. ed. White and Burnard (New York: Routledge, 2020), 188–203; Mary Turner, ‘The 11 O’clock Flog: Women, Work and Labour Law in the British Caribbean’, Slavery & Abolition 20 (1999): 38–58.
29 Da Costa, Crowns of Glory, xvii.
30 Higman, Slave Populations, 6–39.
31 Noel Titus, The Amelioration and Abolition of Slavery in Trinidad, 1812-1834: Experiments and Protests in a New Slave Colony (London: Autherhouse, 2009), 17-27.
32 Higman, Slave Populations, 11.
33 Higman, Slave Populations, 12–13.
34 Higman, Slave Populatons, 36
35 E.A. Wrigley and R.S. Schofield, The Population History of England, 1541–1871 (London: Edward Arnold, 1981).
36 TNA, T71/438-9/49-64.
37 Trevor Burnard and John Lean, ‘Hearing Slave Voices: The Fiscal’s Reports of Berbice and Demerara-Essequebo’, Archives 27 (2002): 37–50; Burnard, Hearing Slave Voices: Slave Testimony from Berbice (Georgetown, Guyana: Guyana Classics Series, 2010).
38 John, Plantation Slaves of Trinidad, 67; Higman, Slave Populations, 367. For polygamy in Africa, see Paul Lovejoy, Transformations in Slavery; A History of Slavery in Africa, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Recent work on the slave family has concentrated heavily on the maternal-child unit and on women and reproduction. Kenneth Morgan, ‘Slave Women and Reproduction in Jamaica, c. 1776-1834’, History, 91 (2006): 231–53; Katherine Paugh, ‘The Politics of Childbearing in the British Caribbean and the Atlantic World during the Age of Abolition’, Past & Present 221 (2013): 119–60; Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing and Slavery in Jamaica (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
39 Stephen D. Behrendt, Philip D. Morgan and Nicholas Radburn, ‘African Cultures and Creolization on an Eighteenth-Century St. Kitts Sugar Plantation’, Past and Present 253 (2021): 195–234. For an exemplary earlier study of large-scale family patterns in the French Caribbean, see Gabriel Debien, Les esclaves aux Antilles Francaises (XVIIe-XVIIIe siècles (Basse-Terre and Fort-de-France: Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe and Martinique, 1974).
40 Orlando Patterson, The Sociology of Slavery (rev. ed.: Cambridge: Polity, 2022; first edition, 1967), 167.
41 Alvin O. Thompson Colonialism and Underdevelopment in Guyana, 1580–1803 (Bridgetown: Carib Research Publications, 1987).
42 Michael Tadman, ‘The Demographic Cost of Sugar; Debates on Slave Societies and Natural Increase in the Americas’, American Historical Review 105 (2000): 1534–75.
43 TNA, T71/438-9/49-64.
44 Higman, Montpelier, 118–23; Ann Paton Malone, Sweet Chariot: Slave Family and Household Structure in Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), ch.5.
45 For polygamy in Africa, see G. Ugo Nwokeji, The Slave Trade and Culture in the Bight of Biafra: An African Society in the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For African family patterns, see Edna G. Bay, Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey (Charlottesville; University of Virginia Press, 1998); Sandra E. Greene, Gender, Ethnicity, and Social Change on the Upper Slave Coast: A History of the Anlo-Ewe (Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1996).
46 B.W. Higman, ‘The Slave Family and Household in the British West Indies, 1800-1834’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 6 (1975): 261–87.
47 Peter Laslett and Richard Walls, eds., Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 28–9.
48 Jack and Esther Goody, ‘The Circulation of Women and Children in Northern Ghana’, Man 2 (1967): 226–48 and Caroline Bledsoe, ‘The Manipulation of Kpelle Social Fatherhood’, Ethnology 19 (1980): 29–47.
49 John, Plantation Slaves of Trinidad, 67; Higman, Montpelier, 122–23.
50 Randy Browne, Driven: Slavery and Power in the British Caribbean (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).
51 Randy Browne and Trevor Burnard, ‘Husbands and Fathers: The Family Experiences of Enslaved Men in Berbice’, New West India Guide 91 (2017): 193–222.
52 The major study of the revolt is da Costa, Crowns of Glory. For other modern accounts, see Stiv Jakobssen, Am I not a Man and a Brother? British Missions and the Abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery in West Africa and the West Indies, 1786–1838 (Upsalla: Almquist and Wiksells, 1972), ch. 6; Cecil Northcott, Slavery’s Martyr: John Smith of Demerara and the Emancipation Movement, 1817–24 (London: Epworth Press, 1976); Michael Craton, Testing the Chains: Resistance to Slavery in the British West Indies (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1982), ch. 21; Michael A. Rutz, The British Zion: Congregationalism, Politics and Empire, 1790–1850 (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2011), 62–67; Anthony E. Kaye, ‘Spaces of Rebellion: Plantations, Farms and Churches in Demerara and Southampton, Virginia’, in The Politics of Second Slavery, ed. Dale Tomich (Albany, NY: State University of New York, 2016), 199–228; Thomas Harding, White Debt: The Demerara Uprising and Britain’s Legacy of Slavery (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2022); John Coffey, ‘“A Bad and Dangerous Book”: The Biblical Identity Politics of the Demerara Slave Rebellion’, in Chosen Peoples: The Bible, Race and Empire in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Gareth Atkins, Shinjini Das and Brian H. Murray (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020), 29–54; Christian Høgsbjerg, ‘The Demerara Rebellion of 1823: Collective Bargaining by Slave Revolt’, International Socialism 179 (2023): 97–114.
53 Høgsbjerg, ‘The Demerara Rebellion’.
54 Harding, White Debt, 81.
55 Harding, White Debt, xix.
56 Manuscript copies of trial records can be found in TNA, CO 111, but much of the relevant material was published in 1824. See the Parliamentary Papers: Demerara, I: Proceedings of a Court Martial in Demerara, on Trial of John Smith, Missionary; Demerara, II: Further Papers relating to the Insurrection of Slaves in Demerara; Demerara, III: Documentary Papers produced at the Trial of Mr John Smith, Missionary (London: House of Commons, 1824) and Report of the Trials of the Insurgent Negroes (Demerara: A. Stevenson, 1824); An Authentic Copy of the Minutes of Evidence on the Trial of John Smith, a Missionary, in Demerara (London: Samuel Burton, 1824); The London Missionary Society’s Report of the Proceedings against the Late Rev. J. Smith of Demerara (London: F. Westley, 1824).
57 Copies of Smith’s journal are held at TNA (CO 111, vol. 46), and SOAS (CWM/LMS/12/05/02). A transcript is available online: https://www.vc.id.au/fh/jsmith.html.
58 Karen King-Aribisala, The Hangman’s Game (Leeds: Peepal Tree Press, 2007).
59 Mélanie Joseph-Vilain, ‘The Hangman’s Game: Karen King-Aribisala’s “Diary of Creation”’, Commonwealth Essays and Studies 31 (2008): 80–92.
60 Gladstone’s Library, Glynne-Gladstone MSS (GG) 2757: Frederick Cort to John Gladstone, 29 August 1823.
61 Demerara, II. 36; Demerara, III. 8, 22; T71/404, f. 2841 (1820); T71/412, ff. 2896 (1823).
62 The missionary recorded that ‘Quamina, Citton [Seaton] and York, 3 of the best, and most sensible Negroes, belonging to Success’, visited him to report that their manager was restricting access to the chapel during a smallpox outbreak (John Smith, ‘Journal’, 30 October 1819).
63 Report of the Trials of the Insurgent Negroes, 51.
64 Demerara, II. 48.
65 Gladstone’s Library, GG/2806: ‘List of Prisoners belonging to Plantation Success in Custody at the Jail at Georgetown 30th September 1823’ (see Appendix A).
66 DaCosta, Crowns of Glory, 47–48.
67 Demerara, I. 5.
68 SOAS Special Collections, CWM/LMS/British Guiana/Berbice Box 1b: John Wray to William Hankey, 2 May 1824.
69 Gladstone’s Library, GG/2809: John Gladstone to William Hankey (of the London Missionary Society), 20 December 1824.
70 TNA, T71/412, f. 2900.
71 TNA, T71/413, Index, unpaginated. The index is an alphabetical listing of estates and individual slaveholders with data on each, including statistics of sex (males/females), age (by decade), births, and ‘Deaths since last registration’.
72 DaCosta, Crowns of Glory, 52.
73 For what follows see Appendix B.
74 Vincent Brown, Tacky’s Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020); Manuel Barcia, The Great African Slave Revolt of 1825: Cuba and the Fight for Freedom in Matanzas (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 2012); Trevor Burnard, Jamaica in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 103–30.
75 Michael Johnson has questioned the Vesey ‘legend’ in ‘Denmark Vesey and his Co-Conspirators’, William and Mary Quarterly, 58 (2001): 915–76, but for evidence that the conspiracy was genuine see Douglas R. Egerton and Robert Paquette, eds, The Denmark Vesey Affair: A Documentary History (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2017).
76 Demerara, II. 77, 89.
77 Patrick H. Breen, The Land Shall be Deluged With Blood: A New History of the Nat Turner Revolt (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).
78 On Amba and Kate see Demerara, II. 58, 97–99.
79 Gladstone’s Library, GG/2806: ‘List of Prisoners’.
80 Demerara, II. 78.
81 TNA, T71/406, f. 403.
82 Alongside the missionary journals and correspondence at SOAS, there is further material in the trial records, including baptismal permits printed in Demerara, III. 21–27, 30–35.
83 Gladstone’s Library, GG/2757: Frederick Cort to John Gladstone, 21 July 1823.
84 Demerara, I. 48.
85 John Smith, ‘Journal’, 18 March 1821.
86 DaCosta, Crowns of Glory, 174–77.
87 Aline Helg, Slave No More: Self-Liberation before Abolitionism in the Americas (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 251–70. On the ideological and organisational importance of mission chapels in 1823 and 1831–32 respectively, see Da Costa, Crowns of Glory, and Mary Turner, The Disintegration of Jamaican Slave Society, 1787–1834 (Mona, Jamaica: The Press University of the West Indies, 1998).
88 Coffey, ‘“A Bad and Dangerous Book”: The Biblical Identity Politics of the Demerara Slave Rebellion’.
89 Gladstone’s Library, GG/2806: ‘List of Prisoners’.
90 Gladstone’s Library, GG/2861: John G. Reed to John Gladstone, 3 June 1824.
91 The Missionary Smith: Substance of the Debate in the House of Commons (London: J. Hatchard, 1824), 38–39.
92 Report of the Trials of Insurgent Negroes, 237–39.
93 TNA, T71/418, ff. 2252–59 (Plantation Success); TNA, T71/415, ff. 818–33 (Plantation Bachelors Adventure).
94 Demerara, II. 50, 55. The trial records call him ‘Anderson, a boy of Success’, but this must have been misheard in court, because there was no Anderson on the estate, only Addison, who fits the description.
95 Demerara, II. 84.
96 TNA, T71/415, f. 822.
97 Gladstone’s Library, GG/272: Wilmot Horton to John Gladstone, 30 March 1825.
98 Gladstone’s Library, GG/2809: Frederick Cort to John Gladstone, 22 April 1824.
99 Gladstone’s Library, GG/272: Wilmot Horton to John Gladstone, 16 March 1825.
100 For sources that are more useful in this regard, see White and Burnard, eds, Hearing Enslaved Voices.
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Notes on contributors
Trevor Burnard
Trevor Burnard is an expert on slavery and the Atlantic World and the author of Writing Early America: From Empire to Revolution (2023) and the forthcoming Oxford Handbook on the Seven Years War (2024). He is Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull and the director of the Wilberforce Institute, Hull.
John Coffey
John Coffey is Professor of History at the University of Leicester. He has published widely on religion, politics and ideas in early modern Britain and the Atlantic world and is currently leading a team editing the diaries of William Wilberforce for Oxford University Press.