Slave Registers and British Guiana: Life and Resistance on Slave Plantations

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Slave registers
• slavery
• slave revolt
• family structures
• colonial archives
• Berbice
• Demerara
• polygamy

Slave Registration Records

The abolition of the slave trade in the British empire in 1807 left the institution of slavery in the British Caribbean intact, with 776,105 enslaved people enmeshed in its web, declining to 664,970 enslaved people at the abolition of slavery by Britain 27 years later, in 1834.¹ Abolitionists’ preoccupation with the abolition of the slave trade was predicated on a belief that once labourers could not be easily procured from Africa, planters would be forced to treat enslaved workers better so that natural population increase could be achieved and slavery made more palatable as an institution while maintaining the plantation system’s viability. As the figures cited above indicate, this dream of achieving natural population increase was a chimera – only Barbados and then only barely experienced an absolute increase in slave population in the late period of West Indian slavery.² In the newer colonies, like Demerara and Berbice, population increase was especially hard to maintain, with the enslaved population of these colonies (plus Essequibo) declining from 109,395 in 1807 to 83,545 in 1834.³

Abolitionists believed that planter behaviour would be better monitored and slavery “ameliorated” if metropolitan governments had greater data about enslaved populations.⁴ This assumption led to the creation of a comprehensive slave registration system, whereby all enslaved people would be individually listed in extensive returns, administered in each West Indian colony by a salaried Registrar of Slaves, appointed by the government, who received the returns and employed clerks to copy them into volumes, or “registers.” These large volumes were sent to the central Slave Registry Office in London. The first registration returns took place in Trinidad in 1813 and by 1817 took place in every West Indian colony. Colonies repeated registration returns until 1834 with Montserrat having only four repetitions and Grenada having seventeen repetitions. The system of slave registration formed therefore part of the legislation aimed at improving the lot of plantation slaves, in particular by providing masses of data, at the level of the individual enslaved person, on enslaved populations and on the masters and mistresses who owned these enslaved people.⁵

In recent years, historians have been pressed to think more deeply about the character of the colonial archive. Black feminist scholars, in particular, have reflected on how the archive silences Black voices and normalises violence done to Black bodies. In Saidiya Hartman’s famous formulation, the slavery archive is a “death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body, an inventory of property, a medical treatise on gonorrhea, a few lines about a whore’s life, an asterisk in the grand narrative of history.”⁶ Jennifer Morgan notes that the victims of slavery “disappeared into merchant ledgers, planter inventories, and modern databases”, and that there are particular problems with “the archival silences around the lived experiences of enslaved women”.⁷ Hazel Carby has written eloquently of her own encounter with the slave registers in the National Archives (TNA), Kew, London. In these massive volumes, she argues, “Human beings who lived and breathed were confined within the straightjackets of columns and bound within ledgers.”⁸ She continues:

Slave registers produce a particular way of seeing, presenting a regime of truth that governs visibility. The politics of this arithmetic is not only about rendering invisible the humanity of those listed but also about rendering what is visible within particular frames. Writing within the confines of these registers and plantation records is an act intended to submit the enslaved to the use of those who wield the pen: pen and ink and paper, hands copying and re-inscribing relations of domination and subordination. The orderly columns and headings and lists belie the disorder of field, plantation, estate, house and bedroom. Slave registers purport to be a rational measured form of accounting, but in the face of unreasoning and arbitrary violence that governed the plantation they are a symptom of imperial insanity.⁹

These critics make powerful interventions and they rightly foster a hermeneutic of suspicion towards colonial archives. “As academics”, observes Carby, “we sit in archives and stare at these records and registers, ledgers and lists, each carefully rendered in measured and elegant script”, and we are prone to forget “the terror and violence camouflaged by this comestic beauty”.¹⁰ For the most part, slave registers hide the terror and violence, though (as we shall see) they do document the human cost of plantation slavery, both collective and personal. Suspicion of these documents need not foster disuse. Carby herself skilfully employs the registers to reconstruct part of her family history in Jamaica.¹¹ As her own work suggests, these sources contain valuable material and the methods of the historian can be used to gather information from them while being aware of their biases and deficiencies.

Moreover, we should not forget the abolitionist origins of the registration scheme, something that Carby passes over in a fleeting phrase.¹² For James Stephen, the principal advocate of a centralised register, West Indian slavery was “the most extreme and abject slavery that ever degraded and cursed mankind”, an “evil” which the British were morally “bound to terminate”. In the meantime, the registers were designed to prevent the “illicit importation” of “poor injured Africans” by “barbarous” British slave traders, promote better treatment of the enslaved in the Caribbean, and protect free people of colour from re-enslavement.¹³ The registration scheme met with fierce opposition from the West Indian lobby, who blamed abolitionist agitation for fomenting the 1816 Barbados rebellion.¹⁴ To these contemporary critics of slave registers, they were the nefarious brainchild of “our modern ‘friends of humanity’”.¹⁵

There was, in fact, an important contrast between the slave registers and the slave trader’s ledger book, which “transformed individual captives into ‘the aggregate that formed the ‘complete’ human cargo’”.¹⁶ Whereas in slave ship journals, such as those kept by John Newton, enslaved Africans were reduced to mere numbers, the registers recorded personal names.¹⁷ Of course, even names bore witness to the indignity of slavery: mock heroic classical names like Telemachus, Prince and Scipio, or Anglo-Saxon place-names imposed as an act of cultural imperialism.¹⁸ For plantation managers and attorneys, who entered such names in their returns, individuals were commodities. For historians, however, the practice of naming makes it possible to identify and recognise individual persons, to trace them across different sources, and to recover what we can of their lives.

While there is a danger of perpetuating the impersonal and depersonalising perspective of official censuses, (their “deadening enumeration”),¹⁹ there is also a loss in dismissing these sources, or merely neglecting them. Indeed, one could argue that the current problem with historians and slave registers is not one of over-reliance, but under-use. The reason might be that they were taken up, when they were taken up, by historians in the period of social science domination of historical research which favoured large-scale quantitative projects and such kinds of research have been less popular after the move to cultural history research from the 1990s to the present. If we exclude a few exploratory essays by the Jamaican sociologist, G.W. Roberts, between 1952 and 1977, there are only two major studies, now quite dated, that use these records extensively. The first is a mathematical and demographical study of slaves in Trinidad by A. Meredith John and the second is Barry Higman’s indispensable and monumental reconstruction of Caribbean slave populations between 1807 and 1834.²⁰ There are some signs that historians are beginning to make greater use of the registers. The Legacies of British Slavery project at University College, London, for example, has begun a project, “Valuable Lives,” which uses the slave registers as a means of harnessing modern database technology, computational approaches and innovative historical methods to study not just slaveholders but enslaved people, linking them to communities after emancipation.²¹ In addition, B.W. Higman and Richard Dunn used slave registers from Jamaica in their exploration of two large sugar estates, Montpelier and Mesopotamia.²² Using the slave registers for 1817, David Alston has demonstrated that over four hundred “free coloured” or “free black” women in Demerara were registered as slave owners, with a dozen such women owning twenty or more enslaved persons each.²³

Nevertheless, slave registration records have not been explored to anywhere near the extent that these records warrant. The relative lack of attention to slave registration records is unfortunate, because the hundreds of volumes collected in the Treasury 71 series at the National Archives, are a source of unparalleled importance in the historiography of slavery in the last two decades of slavery in the British empire.²⁴ This article uses material from the slave registration records to deepen our understanding of slavery in the final frontier of West Indian slavery, the South American colonies of Demerara and Berbice, which, with Essequibo, became incorporated into the colony of British Guiana in 1834.²⁵ We make two case studies of enslaved populations on the properties of two of the wealthiest slaveowners in the British Empire in the early nineteenth century, James Blair and John Gladstone, each of whom were among the top recipients of compensation money from the British government in 1834.²⁶ The first case study of the largest single adjoined slave property in the British West Indies, Blairmont, with 1,298 enslaved people, provides detailed information about family relationships among the enslaved. We have chosen this case study as it provides the most detailed information of any plantation in the Berbice slave registration records so far noted and in particular lists family relationships with a degree of detail that is not available in any other plantation list for this colony. It is advantageous, also, that the Blairmont slave lists are the largest lists of slaves for any West Indian holding. The second case study of Success plantation in Demerara shows how material from the slave registration records can be combined with other sources to advance our knowledge of the protagonists at the heart of the most significant event to happen on that estate, the 1823 Demerara slave rebellion. We show that it is possible to move beyond large-scale quantitative analyses using slave registration records so as to explore individuals on particular properties.

This article is intended primarily to alert scholars to the ways in which slave registers can be used to reconstruct enslaved populations and add depth to analyses of major events such as a slave rebellion but it links to work done elsewhere on enslaved demography in the Caribbean and to a literature on recapturing enslaved voices in nineteenth century Berbice and Demerara so that the experience of the enslaved is not dictated only through the perspectives of the enslavers who were the primary creators of records about slavery. The slave registration records need to be connected to material in the Fiscals’ records for Berbice, which Randy Browne has effectively used. Browne demonstrates the many ways in which enslaved people took the unfortunate circumstances under which they laboured in order to gain some advantages for themselves as individuals and as collectives within slavery. Browne draws on the work on Michel de Certeau and de Certeau’s distinction between resistance to systems (that in the case of slavery might lead to slave rebellion), and tactics of opposition that oppressed people adopted (ones that operated within systems that were reluctantly accepted by enslaved people because they had little choice but to accept their condition, but were means of shaping those conditions a little bit in their favour).²⁷ Browne sees such actions as “survival” tactics and he uses the Fiscal records, as had also been done by Emilia Viotta Da Costa, Mary Turner and Trevor Burnard, to delve deeper into how enslaved people coped with slavery.²⁸ This article contributes to a relatively limited but impressive historiography on slavery in early nineteenth century British Guiana through the use of additional archival sources that could be more heavily used in order to examine colonies (Demerara and Berbice) which Da Costa shows to be places that were changing from within in the 1820s with growing confrontation between masters and the enslaved, where “slaves wove new narratives about the world, created new forms of kinship, and invented new utopias.”²⁹

It is worth providing a few more words on what the slave registration records contain so that we can show what potentially important sources they are for the study of slavery in the last two decades before abolition. The primary advantage of slave registration records is their size and comprehensiveness. Almost every enslaved person living in the Caribbean from 1817 to 1834 is mentioned by name, allowing for some chance of connecting individuals to estates and owners. Barry Higman has made a comprehensive assessment of the history of slave registration and how it was administered; the nature of the data and the strengths and weaknesses of the material contained in the slave registration records. Higman’s key points that are relevant to this study are as follows:³⁰

First, the initial registration returns comprised a census of slaves living in a colony at a specified date. Various pieces of personal information were provided in these returns, much of which was determined by the policies of colonial governments and the willingness of slaveowners to provide those governments with requisite information.³¹ Only two items about enslaved people were recorded consistently – their names and ages. Higman concludes that “the amount of detail available in the registration returns is greatest for the late-settled sugar colonies, and least for the non-sugar marginal colonies, with the old sugar colonies falling somewhere in-between.”³² In Demerara, data was available on “Sex”, “Name”, “Colour”, “Age”, “Bodily Marks” (including African scarification), “Employment”, “Condition” (whether healthy or invalid), and “Country” (or birthplace). The records for Berbice were slightly more extensive. All the information available for enslaved people in Demerara was provided for the enslaved in Berbice. In addition, there was occasional information on stature and family relationships.³³

Higman outlines some of the deficiencies of the slave registration returns, such as errors in transcription; planter recalcitrance in providing some information; biases towards white assumptions about enslaved behaviour, notably in thinking that the only viable family relationships were those that existed between mother and child; some age misreporting and age heaping around common, usually decadal, ages. Despite these limitations, Higman convincingly argues that “the returns comprise an extraordinarily rich and comprehensive collection of information, rarely surpassed in comparable slave societies and generally standing up to quite strict tests of reliability.”³⁴ It is important, also, to note how administratively forward-thinking slave registration was when it was initiated – it involved both periodic census enumeration and continuous registration of births and deaths. This was new for the British empire. In fact, the United Kingdom, upon which the administrative services were patterned, had taken only two censuses (1801 and 1811) while its introduction of vital registration did not begin until 1837.³⁵

The Blairmont Estate, Berbice

Some idea of the usefulness of the slave registration records can be seen in our two quite different case studies of plantations in present-day Guyana. Our first case study is of a massive slaveholding in Berbice, found in the slave registers for that colony in 1819.³⁶ It provides more details than any slave registration record we have seen, at least for a very large slaveholding, with personal information that goes beyond the normal mentioning of name, occupation, and age to provide information on ethnicity and, most remarkably, on family structure. This analysis deals with only one aspect of the Blairmont slave registration record – more could be done to flesh out not just enslaved familial relationships but also patterns of work and ethnicity, especially if combined with other rich records, such as the extensive fiscal records of Berbice.³⁷ Nevertheless, what is revealed in the area of slavery – familial structures – that we have chosen to examine in this case study allows us to alter two important assumptions about West Indian slave life in the early nineteenth century, which is that patriarchy was difficult to achieve within slave communities and that polygamous practises did not survive the transit from Africa to the Caribbean.³⁸

Our work connects with studies of slave communities done using other sorts of records, such as plantation documents generated by managers for absentee owners. It differs from an earlier generation of investigation into enslaved family formation which concentrated on overarching structures drawn from extensive if not specific sets of data. This study of Blairmont is a microhistory, similar in some respects to that recently done by Stephen D. Behrendt, Philip D. Morgan and Nicholas Radburn on a large early eighteenth-century sugar estate in St. Kitts, using census and plantation records, although this study focused on African origins rather than family formation.³⁹ Such microhistories allow for a focus on enslaved people, whose lives often fade from view when a broader perspective is adopted. White-created records can be frustratingly devoid of personality and individuality but they can be revealing about enslaved life if the details provided are as rich as those we see from Blairmont in the slave registration records for Berbice in 1819.

The slave registration records for Blairmont are large and extensive. They detail the slave holdings of James Blair, who owned 1,298 enslaved people in 1819, divided among four very large and one medium sized sugar plantation. Blair was an absentee planter and a member of parliament between 1818 and 1830 and 1837 and 1841. His largest plantation was Catharinasburg with 332 enslaved people; then Bath and Nuringsteid with 330; Plantation 5 and 7 with 239; Merville and Chiswick with 203 enslaved people; and Utile and Paisible with 143 enslaved. They were all on the West Side of the Berbice River. The registers also seem to be an accurate accounting of family relationships. This was not always the case given that the lists of slaves provided to the registrar of slaves in West Indian colonies were written by slaveholders and represented the prejudices that slaveholders had about enslaved families, namely that family life was impossible given the chaos of slavery and thus “the nuclear family could hardly exist within the context of slavery.”⁴⁰

Blairmont, which was the name given to the consolidated estates, was both typical and atypical of Berbice plantations. Berbice was a colony that turned late to sugar planting and resembled in its slave structures Jamaica a century earlier. Huge numbers of Africans had been imported legally and illegally into Berbice as the British took over from the Dutch in the period of the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. Cotton production declined and sugar production increased during the 1810s.⁴¹ The result was a colonial enslaved population that was heavily African and one that seldom experienced natural increase, given that working in sugar was devastating for enslaved morbidity and mortality.⁴² The ending of the slave trade made Berbice’s enslaved demography distinctive. In 1819, the majority of the adult population was aged between 30 and 50, people who would have been in their early 20s when the slave trade was abolished. Nearly 30 per cent of enslaved adults on Blairmont were aged between 35 and 39 and over 80 per cent were aged between 30 and 49. Virtually no enslaved people were aged over 60 and fewer than 3 per cent of adults were in the prime childbearing years of 20–24 with just over 10 per cent of people in total aged in their 20s. The population divided almost neatly into two: adult Africans and children born in in Berbice. There were just 25 enslaved people on Blairmont over 22 who were born in Berbice, compared to 664 Africans and 8 adults born elsewhere in the Caribbean. The African heritage of slaves was enhanced by the very small number of slaves – 16 – who were of mixed-race heritage.

Blairmont was typical in having a very African dominated enslaved population but it was distinctive in experiencing reasonably positive demographic conditions. Blair’s slaveholdings increased considerably over time, seemingly mostly from natural increase, so that when slavery ended, he was named as the owner of 1,598 enslaved people, 300 more than in 1819.⁴³ We can be more certain that demography was positive comparing numbers in 1819 with an abbreviated list of enslaved people in the slave registers of 1822. This register showed a small excess of births over deaths (120 births to 108 deaths). One possible reason for this rare demographic success is that on Blairmont enslaved children did relatively light work before becoming field labourers aged 16 and 17. It is revealing that hardly any slaves aged between 10 and 30 died on Blairmont between 1819 and 1822. The demographic performance of Blairmont was thus in contrast not just to demographic performance in Berbice and Demerara in general but much superior to demographic performance on extensively studied enslaved populations working in Jamaica and Louisiana, where demographic conditions were harsh and populations experienced demographic decline.⁴⁴

What is especially interesting about the Blairmont enslaved population, as revealed in the detailed information given in slave registration records, is that we can examine an enslaved population where the great majority of adults (over 95 per cent for adults over 30) were African. Did this population establish a distinctive family structure that adhered to African familial patterns, notably the establishment of households that regularly incorporated children that were not direct kin, led by men who took an active role as fathers, and in which some dominant men established polygamous households?⁴⁵

The family structure on Blairmont was quite different to that customarily assumed within West Indian slave societies, where it is believed that there was a strong tendency towards matrifocality.⁴⁶ In fact, the life experiences of women on Blairmont were heavily influenced by the men they lived with and with whom they had children. Almost all enslaved women lived under the ostensible control of a man and in households headed by men. Few women lived by themselves or with children or grandchildren without a man in the household. More men than women were solitaires, reflecting the gender imbalance in the population. Most men, however, lived in households with either or both women and children. The dominant kind of household in Berbice, as in sugar estates in Louisiana and Jamaica, was the “simple family”, defined by Peter Laslett as the nuclear family with a conjugal link, either husband-wife or parent–child and in which at least two individuals connected by the conjugal link were co-resident. The “simple family” included the so-called “truncated” nuclear family, composed of married couples without children or single-parent households.⁴⁷ What an analysis of Blairmont shows is that even in a recently settled, socially disorganised, and brutally efficient and violent slave society, one that exhibited high levels of mortality, excessively high rates of punishment and consequent dislocation in household structures, a majority of men managed to live in family groupings. On Blairmont, 49.5 per cent of adult men lived with wives and sometimes children and another 7 per cent headed households with only children. In short, over half of adult men on Berbice’s largest slaveholding had familial authority over other people, including 159 men with wives. Husbands tended to be older than wives, with a gap of five years and four months, with forty-six men between ten and eighteen years older than their wives and eight husbands who were between nineteen and twenty-nine years older than their partners. Patriarchy tends to be more easily established when authority follows substantial age differentials between men and women.

Men were also fathers – only six per cent of children on Blairmont did not have a named father and most of these were the small number of mixed-race children. On Blairmont, 194 men (46.9 per cent) were fathers and a further thirty-four men headed households in which children who were not their biological progeny were present, meaning that fifty-five per cent of men were fathers or acted as fathers. Some men had large numbers of children. The most fecund couples were Alexander, 46, a chief driver and husband of Juno, 44, and Tom, 43, a cook, and partner of Portia, 36, each with eight children. Alexander was easily the man with the most children of all men on Blairmont, with thirteen children in total with his two wives, Juno and Nelly.

In short, enslaved men on Blairmont often headed relatively large households, containing their own children, the children (usually older) of their wife with another man and occasionally even unrelated children. For example, Ammy, 12, the daughter of Cicero and Elizabeth, both of whom were dead, lived with Quashey, 34, and Pandora, 28, and their two children while Hugh, the eight-year-old son of Patty and Quashey, both of whom were dead, lived with an otherwise unrelated couple, Nestor, 30, and Stella, 39. But what is remarkable is how many children lived with both their mother and father in a “simple” nuclear family. There were 272 children (49.5 per cent of all children) who lived with both of their natural mother and father. An additional thirty-one children lived with their father in other kinds of households while 122 children lived with their natural mother but not their natural father. There were just nine children (1.6 per cent) who lived in a household where they had neither a natural mother or natural father. Thus, most children lived in households where they were not the only child but were embedded in a reasonably dense network of family members. Indeed, fifty-five children (6.9 per cent) lived in five very large households, each containing ten or more people and in which there were fifteen adults.

The most surprising fact about Blairmont was the extent to which by 1819 the enslaved population had established a custom of polygyny, a well-established practice in West Africa which was part of a concerted effort to establish and maintain patriarchal power and which led to family structures which were different to those in Western Europe.⁴⁸ Usually, scholars of Afro-Caribbean family structures downplay the importance of polygyny in slave households. Polygyny was minimal in Trinidad in 1813 and St Lucia in 1815, at least as reported by slave owners, and only slightly more common on Montpelier estate, studied by B.W. Higman, in the 1820s.⁴⁹ On Blairmont, however, nine men established polygynous relationships, seven with two wives, and February, 56, and Janbert, 51, with three wives.

Two things stand out in these polygynous relationships. First, contrary to planter prejudice that polygyny was a constraint on female fertility, these relationships were models of fecundity with most households large and full of children – they contained nine men, nineteen women, 65 and 3 children, amounting in total to 7.7 per cent of all Blairmont slaves, living in complex, sometimes multigenerational, polygynous families. Second, the heads of polygynous families were the leading patriarchs on slave plantations. Three of the five chief drivers (the most important slave position on an estate) were heads of polygynous households. They tended to be older than normal, as well. The men who had more than one wife tended to be older men holding positions of authority within the slave population, such as drivers and skilled craftsmen. Having several wives within patriarchal family structures was a sign of men re-establishing African social structures in the Caribbean. The average age for a polygynist was 47 while the average age of wives was 36. Second and third wives tended to be younger by a couple of years than the first wives. Most polygynists were privileged slaves with five men drivers, two carpenters, and just two men field hands.⁵⁰

Of course, we need to acknowledge that patriarchal authority among enslaved men was always a delicate project, as Trevor Burnard and Randy Browne have explored in assessing the difficulties of establishing patriarchal power, using fiscals’ records from Berbice.⁵¹ Slave men’s patriarchal authority was constrained by the conditions of enslavement. Men’s ability to provide for or to have authority over their wives and children were handicapped by poverty, by excessive labour regimes in which it was white men rather than enslaved men who determined how and when women and children worked, and by planter interference, including sexual interference, in the family lives of the enslaved. Yet amidst the chaos of plantation life, slave men managed to achieve more than white observers thought possible. They were fathers and husbands, and in their own ways, patriarchs of their own households and families. The ability of men in Berbice to achieve such patriarchal authority needs to be considered not just in evaluating fatherhood and marriage in Berbice slavery but also in how we assess how the women who lived with such men and who were generally subservient to them survived a particularly harsh slave regime.

The Success Estate, Demerara

Our second case study is Plantation Success, the estate at the centre of the 1823 Demerara uprising. Although short-lived, this was one of the largest slave revolts in the history of the British Caribbean.⁵² There were two principal leaders: Quamina, head carpenter of Success and head deacon of Bethel Chapel, led by a Nonconformist missionary on the adjacent estate of Le Resouvenir; and Quamina’s son, Jack, the cooper of Success, sometimes known as Jack Gladstone after the estate’s absentee proprietor, the Liverpool merchant John Gladstone. The enslaved people on Success had recently been put to the gruelling work of sugar production, but there were two more immediate triggers: first, a crackdown on chapel attendance and religious gatherings on estates, and second, rumours of a “new law” from Britain mandating emancipation or, at least, amelioration. Convinced that the colonial authorities were refusing to implement the new law, the ringleaders gathered on the middle walk of Success after a chapel service on Sunday 17 August. They agreed to force the issue by mobilising enslaved people across the plantations. The insurgents would lay down their tools and take up arms after disarming managers and overseers and confining them in the stocks. Although this was to be an armed uprising, it was also designed to avoid bloodshed; instead, the protestors would demand their rights and their freedom in a militant act of collective bargaining.⁵³

In the event, thousands of enslaved people rose up across Demerara’s East Coast on the evening of Monday 18 August. After seizing control of some forty plantations, they were quickly confronted by heavily-armed colonial forces, and routed at the battle of Bachelors Adventure on Wednesday. The reprisals that followed occupied many months. Search parties were sent into the “Bush” to capture Quamina and Richard; insurgents were court martialled and sentenced to death, or to flogging, or (in the case of Jack) to banishment. Even the missionary, John Smith, was tried and condemned to death for inciting the rebellion. He died of consumption in a dank colonial prison in February 1824 while awaiting a royal reprieve.

The context for the revolt was reconstructed in great detail by the late Brazilian historian, Emilia Viotti da Costa, in her classic book, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood (1994). It remains an indispensable work for historians of slave resistance. Da Costa made meticulous use of trial records, colonial archives, missionary archives, newspapers, periodicals, and other sources. Yet her work has been criticised by Thomas Harding, in his recent popular study of the uprising, for placing the missionary John Smith at “the centre of the narrative” and giving “scant space to the enslaved point of view”. As Harding points out, Da Costa “does not mention Quamina till page 104 and Jack until page 172”.⁵⁴ The index to Crowns of Glory features the names of forty whites (colonists, statesmen, missionaries, intellectuals etc), but only two enslaved persons (Quamina and Jack). Harding’s own book seeks to rectify this by focussing on the central figure of Jack. However, the other three protagonists on whom Harding focuses are white (John Smith, John Gladstone, and the militiaman John Cheveley), and of his “Cast of Characters”, only five (out of eighteen) are Black: Jack, Quamina, the deacon Bristol, Jack’s former wife Susannah, and Jack’s friend Daniel, the governor’s servant.⁵⁵

This skewing of perspective owes much to the trial records. The court martial of the White missionary occupied an entire month from 13 October to 19 November, matching the time it had taken the colonists to court martial and sentence some seventy Black insurgents between 26 August and 2 October.⁵⁶ By blaming Smith for the rising, the colonists put him at the centre of the story, though historians agree that he played no part in planning the rebellion. His death secured his martyr status back in Britain, and his remarkable journal, kept from 1817 to 1823, ensured that he remained central in Da Costa’s account.⁵⁷

The Guyanese-Nigerian novelist, Karen King-Aribisala, escapes the constraints of the colonial archive by creating a fictionalised alternative history of the rising centred on three female protagonists: Auntie Lou, the governor’s domestic slave, her daughter Rosita, and Mary, the missionary’s wife.⁵⁸ As one critic notes, her novel “playfully undermines official history” and reinscribes the voices of the enslaved.⁵⁹ Historians do not enjoy the artistic license of novelists. Obliged to work with the extant contemporary sources, we have to read them against the grain, using them to address questions never asked by their original compilers. In the case of Demerara in 1823, the colonial sources can enable historians to adjust the picture, bringing the enslaved insurgents into sharper focus. The trial records contain a wealth of incidental detail about individuals that can be cross-referenced with the missionary sources, and with two other sources that Da Costa did not deploy: the Gladstone Papers at Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden, Flintshire, and the Slave Registers in the National Archives. The Gladstone papers include correspondence from Demerara as well as a “List of Prisoners belonging to Plantation Success at the Jail in George Town 30th September 1823” (see Appendix A). The slave registers provide us with personal information on sex, name, colour, age, bodily marks, employment, condition, and country (see Appendix B). Considered in isolation, slave registers have limited value for the study of individuals, but when correlated with other sources, they add vital detail, allowing us to build a collective profile of the insurgents and to bring them into the centre of the picture.

Identifying named persons in the slave registers is usually straightforward, but there can be complications. One of the named insurgents, Cato, was a free man, and thus is not included in the registers. The attorney of Success, Frederick Cort, explained that Cato was “a Slave whom I manumitted about two or three years ago together with his Wife”.⁶⁰ Gracy was enslaved, but it is not clear if she “belonged” to the manager, John Stewart, rather than to the plantation; if the latter, she was probably the 27-year-old field slave listed in the register as Grace.⁶¹ By 1823, there were two Graces on Success, and it was not uncommon for there to be two (or even three) persons with the same name on a plantation; in the absence of surnames, it can be difficult to determine which is the insurgent. This was the case with York on Success, though given his closeness to Quamina, it seems almost certain that he was the 55 year old carpenter rather than a 36 year old Field slave.⁶² The “Jemmy” of Bachelors Adventure, who was court martialled, does not appear in the slave register, but there are two Jimmys, one a teenager, the other aged 41; the one who was court martialled must be the older man, since witnesses of a similar age testify that they had known each other “since we were children together”.⁶³ For the most part, however, we can readily match the names given in trial records and missionary archives with the names in the registers.

Other difficulties concern the exact part played by each of our protagonists in the revolt. Most of those listed below were undeniably in the thick of events, and a number were repeatedly cited as ringleaders: Quamina, Jack, and Richard on Success; Joseph, Prince and Telemachus on Bachelors Adventure. But some of those arrested and gaoled denied involvement in the plot. They included Quamina’s half-brother, Joe, who declared: “we did not agree as to the freedom … I thought it was mistaken”.⁶⁴ The attorney on Success assumed that he and two others had only been detained as a witness (against John Smith): “Nothing particular known by us against them”.⁶⁵ Seaton, a sugar boiler on Success, and a deacon of the missionary chapel, sought to distance himself from the revolt, but he was close to Quamina, involved in the initial plotting, and described by a number of witnesses as a leader. In some other cases, there is eyewitness testimony placing the individual at the scene of the rebellion, but sometimes there is only one such witness. For the great majority of those listed, however, we can be confident that they were implicated in the rising, and often to the fore.

A full database of plotters and insurgents named in the extant records would include some two hundred people, so for the purposes of this article we will focus on Success, where the uprising was plotted, and (as a point of comparison) on Bachelors Adventure, where it was effectively ended. Of the sixty or so estates along the East Coast, Success was the twenty-first from the capital, George Town, while Bachelors Adventure was the forty-first estate, two-thirds of the way down the coast towards Berbice. The capital investment of John Gladstone had switched Success from cotton to sugar production, and Bachelors Adventure had changed from cotton to mixed production by 1823. The transition to sugar production, prompted by competition from cotton plantations in the United States and by the prospect of higher financial returns, intensified the work regime on Success.⁶⁶ Smith warned an overseer that “they would work their people to death”.⁶⁷ Another missionary, John Wray, reported that ever since Mr Gladstone “put it into Sugar they have complained of hard and late Work”.⁶⁸ Gladstone indignantly denied “these calumnies”, insisting that “the labour required from my people has always been moderate, without any complaint on their part”.⁶⁹ The slave registers belie his claim, and confirm the human cost of sugar production. The population of Success was 326 in 1820, and 327 in 1823, but deaths had exceeded births in these years by 32 to 19; it was only “Increase by Purchase” that had prevented an overall decline. Success had “purchased” fifteen enslaved people since 1820.⁷⁰ On Bachelors Adventure, by contrast, births had exceeded deaths, and the estate (twinned with Enterprise) had a population of 671. But of these, a mere 15 were in their sixties, and only two had survived beyond seventy (both octogenarians).⁷¹ The slave registers documented the attritional toll the plantations took on the lives of enslaved people. Overall, they recorded demographic decline. Between 1817 and 1829, the enslaved population of Demerara and Essequibo shrank by almost ten per cent, from 77,163 to 69,386.⁷²

This ran against the hopes and expectations of the British abolitionists who had lobbied for the introduction of slave registers. By recording each and every enslaved person on every plantation, these bulky volumes had been designed to deter the illegal importation of Africans through the Atlantic slave trade, and to track the process of amelioration. Abolitionists believed that the ending of the slave trade would force proprietors and managers to improve the conditions of the enslaved in order to maintain and grow the population. Indeed, abolitionists had long argued that newly imported Africans were the main source of slave revolts, and they predicted that improving conditions and the process of creolisation would reduce the risk of insurgencies after the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade. Had things gone according to plan, the slave registers would have recorded an excess of births over deaths as amelioration produced a pattern of natural demographic growth. In reality, the opposite occurred. The harshness and brutality of these plantations was a major factor behind the revolt.

The slave registers for Success and Bachelors Adventure confirm that the Demerara revolt was not exclusively or even predominantly driven by men born in Africa.⁷³ In this respect, it was quite unlike Tacky’s Rebellion on Jamaica in 1760, or the Cuban slave revolt of 1825, which were African-led.⁷⁴ African-born men did play an important role in 1823, but due to the abolition of the British Atlantic slave trade in 1807-08, we can assume that these men had already lived in the Caribbean for at least fifteen years. Missionary records and slave registers continued to distinguish between the “African” and the “Creole”, but the distinction was increasingly blurred. What is striking about both Success and Bachelors Adventure is the balance and collaboration between men whose “Country” is recorded as “Africa”, and “Creoles” born in Demerara or other colonies. Of the named insurgents on Success whose birthplace can be identified in the slave register, fourteen were African-born, twelve Creole. On Bachelors Adventure, we find six born in the Caribbean, four in Africa. The registers tell us that some of these men (Seaton, Sheldrick, and Smart on Success; Joseph on Bachelors Adventure) bore “Country Marks”, physical representations of their African identities, ethnicities, and status.

Across the plantations as a whole, however, the African/Creole ratio was roughly one-third to two-thirds. Moreover, evidence from the trial records and other sources suggests that the majority of the ringleaders were Creole. Quamina of Success and his son Jack were at the centre of the plot, and both had been born in Demerara (Quamina as long ago as 1771). So too had key figures like Prince and Telemachus on Bachelors Adventure, whose names recur with some frequency in the trial records. As we have noted, one leading conspirator, Cato, was a free Black, a reminder that manumission did not necessarily translate into moderation: Denmark Vesey, after all, had lived most of his adult life as a free man in Charleston, South Carolina, before his conspiracy in 1822.⁷⁵ On Success, there was tension between Jack and Richard, an African-born man described (by Jack and others) as “violent” – Jack’s restraint versus Richard’s aggression fed into colonial stereotypes of Creoles and Africans. Yet while the rebellion was notable for its respect for human life – only three white men were killed, not in cold blood but in fighting – it is difficult to draw a sharp divide between African and Creole actions. White witnesses complained of the violence of Prince and other Creoles.⁷⁶ In Nat Turner’s Creole revolt in Southampton County, Virginia, in 1831, over fifty white men, women, and children were massacred.⁷⁷

The Demerara revolt was largely, though not exclusively, a male affair. Among the seventy who were court martialled, there is one woman, Kate or Kett of Chateau Margo, who was the only insurgent sentenced to solitary confinement, presumably because the 1823 Order in Council had banned the use of the whip on enslaved women. Another woman, Amba of Enterprise, was seen carrying a musket over her shoulder, and she was depicted on a memorial erected in Georgetown in 2013.⁷⁸ On Le Resouvenir, where Bethel Chapel stood, Jack’s former wife, sexually assaulted by the manager and forced to become his partner, played a key role in the conspiracy, supplying Jack with the latest rumours on developments back in Britain, where abolitionists were talking of emancipation. On Success, other named women were associated with the revolt, including Jack’s new partner, Gracy, with whom he briefly escaped as the rising crumbled, and Hannah and Jessy who also became fugitives, apparently with their respective partners, Richard and Angus.⁷⁹ However, the list of named insurgents is overwhelmingly male.

Intriguingly, these men were a mix of young and old. Given the absence of birth records, there is a false precision about the ages recorded. Jack Gladstone, for example, testified that he was “born thirty years ago”,⁸⁰ but the Success register listed him as 28, and it seems likely that the ages of older people especially were an approximation. However, the broad patterns are clear enough. On Bachelors Adventure, the named insurgents were largely young men in their 20s and 30s. Of the ten listed here, only Jemmy (41) and Rodney (56) were over forty. On Success, by contrast, half the named insurgents were in their 40s or 50s (and were more likely to be African-born). This reflected the dual roles of Quamina (52) and Jack (28), who together orchestrated the revolt. While Jack’s activities are recorded much more fully in the trial records, Quamina’s authority was indispensable. Jack claimed to speak on behalf of his father, and the heavy involvement of older men suggests that Quamina was indeed seen as the head man. The Demerara revolt relied on a combination of youth and authority, Jack’s energy and Quamina’s gravitas.

It also drew on both “elite” slaves and those who worked in the field. In this insurgency, as in many others, skilled artisans and drivers played a leading role. This is particularly striking on Plantation Success, where the “elite” rebels outnumbered the “field” slaves by more than two-to-one. Altogether, sixteen of the named men on Success (out of twenty-four), held “privileged” roles as artisans, boatmen, or drivers. Among them were three or four carpenters, with another two carpenters on Bachelors Adventure. This fits with the larger picture: in the complete list of named conspirators and insurgents, we have the names of some twenty-five carpenters. That fact alone underscores Quamina’s leading role in the planning of this revolt. Jack was extraordinarily enterprising, but he acted in consultation with his father, and under his authority. It was Quamina’s connections with carpenters across the plantations that turned trust into uprising, as they turned out en masse and in force. Boatmen were also strategic. Paris of Good Hope was indicted as one of the main ringleaders of the revolt, having used the waterways that connected the plantations to spread the word. On Success, we find two, perhaps four, boatmen or puntmen, and there were more on other plantations. Drivers seem to have been more divided, as some stood by their managers against the rebels. But Richard, one of the most militant figures in the revolt, was a driver, as was Quamina’s brother, Joe (though he appears to have stood aside from the rising, being gaoled as a witness rather than a ringleader).

On Bachelors Adventure, the composition of the leading men was markedly different from Success. Although there were two carpenters, there were no fewer than seven “Field Slaves”, including several whose names appear again and again in the trial records as ringleaders: Joseph and Prince, who are repeatedly linked to the domestic slave Telemachus. It is intriguing that in the register for Bachelors Adventure, six of the ten named insurgents are listed on the same page, within eight lines: the carpenters Tom and William; and the field slaves Scipio, Kinsale, Natty, and Prince.⁸¹ On this estate, the registrar did not follow the usual practice of listing individuals alphabetically; instead, they were loosely organised by age. The clustering of these six names reflects the fact that they were all between 30 and 36. Yet it is likely that the four field slaves were in the same work gang, and were also close to Tom and William. Here we catch another glimpse of the friendships, forged in hardship, that led enslaved people to march together into revolt.

The registers do not include information about religion, but by correlating our list with the missionary and trial records we can add vital detail to the collective profile.⁸² The prosecution of the missionary was driven by the belief that Bethel Chapel on Le Resouvenir, the estate next door to Success, was the organisational base of the revolt. Quamina was the head deacon of the chapel, and his son Jack one of the catechists. Another deacon, Seaton of Success, was implicated in the rising, and missing from the estate in its immediate aftermath; he had been overseeing an extraordinary reading programme on Success, one with 51 enslaved people enrolled.⁸³ On Bachelors Adventure, there were three more “teachers” (or catechists). Some of the teachers, and all of the deacons, were full “members” of the church, and admitted to take communion at special meetings of church members. There were at least three (possibly half-a-dozen) among the named conspirators or insurgents on Success, and another couple on Bachelors Adventure (Telemachus and probably Joseph). Others had recently been baptised, and counting deacons and teachers, half of the named insurgents on both plantations had been baptised by the missionaries, after a testing interview. Even among the non-baptised, there were regular or irregular “hearers”. On Success, it was reported that almost everyone attended the chapel, at least “occasionally”.⁸⁴ The attorney (Frederick Cort) and the manager (John Stewart) tolerated this, as well as religious meetings on the estate itself. On Bachelors Adventure, however, there was more opposition from managers. Joseph and Prince told Smith that they had been persecuted for their adherence to the Chapel, and placed in the stocks.⁸⁵ Among their persecutors were the colonial officials, Michael McTurk and Cresswell Spencer, who persuaded the governor to issue a proclamation restricting chapel attendance across the East Coast. This was one of the triggers of the rising.⁸⁶ McTurk and Spencer were targeted during the uprising, and the insurgents demanded the restoration of their right to freedom of worship.

The registers allow us to map religious allegiance onto gender, age, birthplace, and occupation. What emerges is the broad appeal of Bethel Chapel to men and women, the old and the young, the African-born and Creoles, skilled artisans and field workers. This is evident from the list of insurgents, and helps to explain why the revolt forged such effective alliances across the dividing lines of age, birthplace, and occupation. A wider analysis of the religiously affiliated suggests that many chapelgoers (like Joe, Quamina’s brother), kept their distance from the revolt, even as it was orchestrated by some the chapel’s “leading men”. Chapelgoers were not necessarily insurgents, but the chapel’s enslaved leadership (and the local estate meetings it fostered) did incubate this revolt. In that sense, Demerara 1823 was part of a new wave of Black Protestant revolts, that included Denmark Vesey’s conspiracy in 1822, Nat Turner’s rebellion in 1831, and Sam Sharpe’s in 1831-32.⁸⁷ Quamina and Jack represented a new kind of rebel leader, well versed in Christian Scripture, and capable of turning it against their enslavers.⁸⁸

Of course, like almost all slave revolts, this one ended in crushing defeat. On Success, the headquarters of the rising, only three fatalities were recorded in the list dated 30 September: William had been killed in the fighting, Quamina had been shot while resisting arrest on 16 September, and Bethney (Beffeney) had been court martialled and executed. Fifteen others were in custody in the Georgetown gaol, and two of these would be executed in January: Hamilton and Richard, the latter of whom had been captured after three months as a fugitive.⁸⁹ In addition, two men from Success were banished from the colony: the free man, Cato, and the principal ringleader, Jack. Jack survived for two reasons: he had protected the lives of white managers and overseers during the course of the revolt, and cooperated with the prosecution in the trial of the missionary. Altogether, the estate had lost seven men: five killed, two banished. On Bachelors Adventure, six of the named insurgents lost their lives: Joseph was reported as killed during the rebellion, and Prince (who was not among the court-martialled and is missing from the 1826 slave register) was almost certainly killed as well. Four other men were court-martialled and executed.

In the aftermath of the revolt, there were conflicting estimates of the number of casualties. Some reported that as many as 600 enslaved men had been killed, while the colonist John Reed told John Gladstone that “the number of deaths altogether including executions does not amount to one hundred”.⁹⁰ In the House of Commons, Henry Brougham asserted that “considerably above a hundred fell in the field”, while others were summarily executed, and 47 put to death after trials.⁹¹ This fits with the colonial newspaper reports and (to a lesser extent) with the evidence from the slave registers. On Success and Bachelors Adventure, the estates with the highest recorded deaths among named insurgents, eleven men had lost their lives: four shot in the fighting or on the run, and seven executed after trial. On Bachelors Adventure, scene of the revolt’s major pitched battle, we have no record of the number of enslaved persons killed in the fighting. In 1826, the estate recorded 55 deaths since 1823, offset by 52 births. Given that decrease by deaths typically outweighed increase by births on Caribbean plantations, this suggests that the total fatalities as a result of the insurrection cannot be much more than the six recorded among our named insurgents. Across the East Coast plantations, there were forty fatalities among named insurgents (ten killed during the rising, thirty executed after it). Yet the entirely disproportionate nature of the reprisals cannot be doubted. Only three white men had been killed in the course of the uprising; at least ten times that number of insurgents were executed and many others lost their lives in fighting for their freedom. Some were decapitated, their heads impaled on poles as a grisly warning to others. Quamina’s corpse was hung in chains outside Success.

What happened to the named insurgents who were eventually released from gaol and returned to their estates? We know that some of these men were only returned after a severe flogging. Jessamine, Frank and Maximilian had been flogged, and some insurgents were sentenced to 700 or 1000 lashes.⁹² The registers for 1826 give us tantalising glimpses of what happened to the surviving insurgents.⁹³ Addison of Success, a “boy” of nineteen, was shot and wounded at Mon Repos; in 1826 he is recorded as “Lame”. No longer mobile enough to work in the field, he had become a cooper, filling a vacancy left by Jack, whose orders he had followed in 1823, and to whom he may have been apprenticed. His work was described as “indifferent”.⁹⁴ Kinsale of Bachelors Adventure, who had denounced an overseer as “a second Pharaoh”, had been condemned to death but respited.⁹⁵ In 1826, he bore the wounds of the rebellion: he had lost an arm, and had a scar on his cheek, and was now consigned to “light work”. Two boatmen on Success appear to have been demoted to the field, probably because it was too risky to permit their continued mobility. On Bachelors Adventure, the former carpenter Cornelius was also relegated to the field gang.⁹⁶

On Success, however, most of those released were back in their old “employment” by 1826, as carpenters, boilers, engineers, drivers, or even (in the case of Windsor) boatmen. It is clear, especially from the Gladstone papers, that the authorities were under pressure from estates to release imprisoned insurgents. While human life was cheap on the plantations, a skilled artisan or boatman was economically valuable. Gladstone, ever the hard-headed merchant, even sought compensation for the loss of Jack.⁹⁷ His attorney warned him that other proprietors resented the fact “that more of your people were not dragged out for trial after the Insurrection”.⁹⁸ Success was thought to have got off lightly given that Quamina, Jack, Richard and its “Gang” were at the centre of the revolt. The insurgents themselves had paid a heavy price. Quamina and Richard were dead, and Jack was now toiling as “a Military labourer on St Lucia”.⁹⁹ It remains to be seen whether historians can pick up his trail.

Conclusion

Colonial slave registers were bureaucratic documents that objectified colonial subjects. These records were mediated through structures controlled by whites – both the slave owners who fashioned the returns and colonial officials who copied out the details provided by slave owners and passed them on to central authority in London. They employed racialised terms: not just “Black”, but “Mulatto” and “Coloured”. They appraised each individual as an economic unit, measured by their “sex”, “age”, “condition”, and “employment”. That euphemism, “employment”, made slave labour sound no different to wage labour. The registers are of little help to the historian who wants to hear the voices of the enslaved or seeks to understand their subjectivity or interiority.¹⁰⁰

Despite this, the slave registration records remain an immense source for the study of slavery in the last two decades of West Indian slavery, and they have been barely touched by historians. What is especially valuable about these records is that they provide detail at the individual level about enslaved people. This article has shown how useful slave registration records can be in chronicling the life of the enslaved in the British West Indies from 1817 to 1834. By concentrating on two case studies of very large slaveholdings in present day Guyana, we have been able to illuminate two crucial aspects of slavery on Caribbean plantations – family structures and slave revolt. We have shown how these records allow us to reconstruct a collective profile of the enslaved and to sketch fuller portraits of individual persons. For all their difficulties and limitations, there is still much to learn from these important sources.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Australian Research Council.

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.

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.

Appendix A:

“List of Prisoners belonging to Plantation Success in Custody at the Jail at Georgetown 30th September 1823”

Gladstone’s Library, Hawarden, Glynne-Gladstone Papers: GG/2806.

[The original document contains brief descriptions of the individuals; this appendix omits the descriptions, but reproduces the full list].

1. Jack the Cooper.

2. Hamilton.

3. Quaco.

4. Jessamin.

5. Britain.

6 & 7. Windsor and Frank.

8. Ralph.

9. Dick the Engineer & Dumfries (Carpenter).

11, 12, 13. Active, Joe, Hay.

14. Smart.

15. Seton.

16. Maximilian.

[Missing]

Richard, Angus, Jessy & Hannah

[Fatalities]

William, Quamina, Beffany [Bethney]

Appendix B:

Named Conspirators/Insurgents in the 1823 Demerara Slave Revolt

Bethney. Names in bold indicate fatalities.

Africa*. Denotes African-born; asterisk signifies “Country Marks” or scarification.

Information in the columns “Religion” and “Fate” is drawn from missionary and trial records. “Religion” indicates level of involvement in the missionary chapel, where known.

PLANTATION SUCCESS

(1823: TNA, T71/412, ff. 2892-2900; 1826: TNA, T71/418, pp. 2252-59)

Table

NAME	AGE	COUNTRY	EMPLOYMENT	RELIGION	FATE	1826
Active	43	Africa	Carpenter	Member?	Gaoled:Witness	Carpenter
Addison/Anderson	19	Demerary	Field		Shot: Wounded	Cooper
Angus	28	Berbice	Field		Fugitive/Captured	Field
Bethney	28	Demerary	Distiller	Occasional	CM: Executed
Britain/Britton	41	Africa	Field	Occasional	CM: Respited	Field
Cato (Free)			Butcher	Member	CM: Banished
Dick	26	Demerary	Engineer	Occasional	CM: Acquitted	Engineer
Dumfries	38	Africa	Carpenter	Member	Gaoled	Carpenter
Frank	40	Africa	Boatman	Occasional	CM: Flogged	Field
Grace/Gracy (F)	27?	Demerary?	Field?	Baptised	Fugitive/Captured	Field
Hamilton	27	Demerary	Puntman?	Occasional	CM: Executed
Hannah (F)	41	Demerary	Field		Fugitive/Captured	Field
Hay	46	Demerary	Field	Member?	Gaoled:Witness	Carpenter
Jack	28	Demerary	Cooper	Teacher	Fugitive/Banished
Jessamine	26	Berbice	Boiler	Occasional	CM: Flogged	Boiler
Jessy (F)	36	Africa	Field		Fugitive/Captured	Field
Joe	56	Barbados	Driver	Member	Gaoled:Witness	Driver
Maximillian	26	Demerary	Boilerman		Flogged	Boiler
Quacco	36	Africa	Puntman?	Occasional	CM: Respited	Field
Quamina	52	Demerary	Carpenter	Deacon	Shot
Ralph	54	Africa	None/Sickly	None	CM: Respited	None
Richard	42	Africa	Driver		Fugitive/Executed
Seaton	48	Africa*	Boilerman	Deacon	Gaoled:Witness	Boiler
Sheldrick	51	Africa*	Fireman			Fireman
Smart	40	Africa*	Field	Baptised	Gaoled	Field
William	36	Africa	Field	Baptised?	Shot
Windsor	40	Africa	Boatman	Baptised	CM: Flogged	Boatman
York	55/36	Africa	Carpenter/Field	Member?		Carpenter

BACHELORS ADVENTURE

(1823: TNA, T71/406, ff. 398-416; 1823: TNA, &71/415, ff. 818-33)

Table

NAME	AGE	COUNTRY	EMPLOYMENT	RELIGION	FATE	1826
Cornelius (“Mulatto”)	22	Demerary	Carpenter	Baptised		Field
Jemmy/Jimmy	41	Africa	Field		CM:Executed
Joseph	36	Africa*	Field	Teacher	Shot
Kinsale	36	Demerary	Field	Hearer	CM: Respited	Light Work
Natty	31	Demerary	Field		CM: Executed
Prince	30	Demerary	Field	Teacher	Shot?
Rodney	56	Africa	Field			Field
Scipio	36	Demerary	Field	Baptised	CM: Executed
Stephen	38	Africa	Carpenter			Carpenter
Telemachus	24	Demerary	Domestic	Teacher	CM: Executed