The highly profitable trade was not without its risks. The journey from Newport to Africa took 40 to 50 days – plenty of time for shipwreck, pirate attack45 or other disasters – and the diseases of the West African coast remained deadly to outsider whites.
The demand for the raw material of rum – molasses – also threatened to cause severe long-term problems. In the late 1720s and early 1730s, a gallon of molasses from Barbados cost 9–10d; in French Martinique the same quantity could be had for as little as 4d. Inevitably, the French islands secured the new market and benefited from the increased demand from New England. Furthermore, the French, by trading with the New Englanders, pushed up the prices of the goods supplied by the northern colonies to their sister settlements on the British islands.
The British sugar planters were not prepared to put up with this for long. Starting in 1730, they complained of penury, and lobbied Whitehall to impose a heavy duty on all foreign sugar, molasses and rum imported into the northern colonies. New Englanders mocked the claims to poverty, pointing out that the sugar barons still ‘live like Lords, and ride in a Coach and Six’. But it was the sugar interest that prevailed in London, where trading with a rival power was seen as against the national interest and the prevailing mercantilist economic orthodoxy. In 1733 the Molasses Act was passed, imposing a duty of sixpence per gallon on molasses imported from non-British territories. This was not a revenue bill, it was effective prohibition, doubling the cost of French molasses for the New England distiller.
The Act represents a turning point in the history of Britain’s first western empire. As John Adams would later write: ‘Molasses was an essential ingredient in American Independence.’ Crucially, the legislation clearly favoured the interests of one set of colonies over another. North Americans complained vociferously that the duty was contrary to their rights as ‘ye King’s natural born subjects and English men in levying subsidies upon them against their consent when they … have no Representatives in Parliament’.
Such dangerous words should, with hindsight, have caused alarm in London, but just as worrying was the subsequent carrying-out of the Molasses Act. In short, it was a dead letter. Rhode Island traders such as James Brown, the founder of the dynasty that would establish Brown University in Providence, quickly sent messages to their captains to bring their molasses, picked up in Martinique, into one of the many quiet bays around the island, out of sight of British patrols.46 Some made even less effort, simply paying off officials who realised that a port without commerce benefited nobody but the distant planter interest in the islands. Thus the flagrant violation of the Molasses Act indicated that North American colonial merchants would not observe, nor would local British officials enforce, a law that would seriously disrupt trade.
So New England’s transatlantic activities continued, with Barbadians complaining in 1736 that the New Englanders sold their slaves in the English islands for cash, which they then spent in the Dutch enclave of St Eustatius on imported goods or on molasses from the French islands. In the same year, the first slaver set sail from Providence, Rhode Island – the Mary, owned by the Brown family and with Obadiah Brown, James’s younger brother, in charge of the cargo. (A ledger of James’s accounts shows a bill from a blacksmith for ‘35 pare of handcoofs’, which indicates they were aiming to take on 70 male slaves.) In Newport, the slave population continued to grow.
Many of the Rhode Islanders growing rich on the West Indies–Guinea trade (such as the Malbones, Godfreys, Vernons, de Wolfs, and Simeon Potter, ‘the father of slaving at Bristol, Rhode Island’) invested their money in sugar estates in the Caribbean. Further afield, the Dickinsons of Philadelphia continued to hold land in the English West Indies, as did a number of other elite North American families. By 1720, Philip Livingstone, whose son would be one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, was a well-established New York merchant shipping rum, tobacco and cheese to England, where he picked up guns and cloth. From there he sailed to West Africa, trading for slaves. With the proceeds he bought up and ran plantations in Jamaica.
For Abraham Redwood, the ownership of estates in Antigua seems to have provided him with a particular hold over his slave workforce in Newport: if you displeased the master, you were sent to join the toilers at Cassada Gardens in Antigua. Redwood’s correspondence tracks the case of one such unfortunate, named only as ‘John’. Clearly, life as a slave in Antigua was considerably harder than in Rhode Island. ‘I fear he will hardly be able to endure such coarse dyet & hard labour as our slaves are put to in this place’, reported Redwood’s agent Edward Byam shortly after John’s arrival in Antigua. Less than a year later, Redwood was told that John was on his way back north, having ‘promised a great amendment’.
The lengthy correspondence of Abraham Redwood also gives a vivid picture of the everyday running of a sugar business by an Anglo-American. What is immediately striking is how difficult and uncertain tropical agriculture was, particularly as monoculture took over, with its attendant problems of pests and soil deprivation. ‘Cane blast’ – infestation by aphids – was a particular menace, as it destroyed acres of crop and required a huge amount of extra work to get rid of. Drought was a constant worry in Antigua – at one point in the late 1720s, water had to be imported at 15 shillings a hogshead. The quality, and therefore marketability, of the sugar varied dramatically, as did its price in Europe, and there never seemed to be enough hands to run the estates to their full potential. Constant rumours of war through the late 1720s and 1730s further destabilised the efforts of Redwood’s managers.
Also noticeable is that a very small coterie of families dominated business on the island, which by the 1720s had a white population of about 5,000 (with some 18,000 black slaves). A tiny handful of names – Langford, Byam, Gunthorpe, Martin, Tomlinson – occur again and again, as fathers and sons, cousins, and often people linked by marriage to each other. The same families led the government and militia on the island.
Between his merchant business and estates in Rhode Island, his plantations in Antigua, and his sugar factor in London (another Tomlinson), Redwood’s operations were complicated and far-flung. He also dealt with merchants in Boston and Bristol, all in a time when letters took months to arrive, and were often lost (the practice emerged of sending the same letter two or even three times to ensure its arrival). To succeed at this was, on its own terms, immensely impressive.
Even before his father’s death, the attorneys running the Redwood core business in Antigua – Byam, then Redwood’s cousin Jonas Langford – had written that Abraham junior should come to ‘look into his affairs’. There were warnings, however, that ‘our Island is very sickly’, ‘especially to strangers’. In the event, it appears that Redwood, on his own, visited Antigua during 1730 for not more than six or eight months. From the subsequent letters, he seems to have been a vigorous presence, suggesting all sorts of improvements, including building work and taking into direct management land on his estate currently rented out to smallholders.
But instead of expansion and improvements, the 1730s would see hard times on the Redwood Antigua estates, as elsewhere in the sugar-producing Caribbean. Expanded French production, particularly in spacious and fertile St Domingue, saw a significant fall in the international price of sugar, and other factors in Antigua contributed to the recession there during the decade. In May 1731, Redwood received a letter from Jonas Langford warning him that the lack of rain meant that income from the crop was insufficient to cover provisions and clothing for the slaves. Shortly afterwards he heard that ‘a most destructive blast’ had ruined his latest sugar and that his London agent was warning that ‘all the merchants refused to advance anything for the West India correspondents; sugars being then so low and the Islands in so declining a condition’. On Antigua, as elsewhere, debts became suddenly much more difficult to collect.
The lack of credit, combined with plagues of insects and droughts, led to an island-wide shortage of provisions in Antigua. Of course
this hit the slave population first, and towards the middle of the decade the Redwood letters show unmistakable signs of the troubles to come, with hungry slaves stealing or fighting among themselves for ever more scarce food. In May 1735, Redwood heard that one of his slaves – Jaffrey – had ‘barbarously’ killed another slave, ‘of Mr French, Barbados, valued at seventy pounds’. Jaffrey was hanged and Redwood was forced to pay compensation to French for the value of his property.
The Antigua planters had been severely rattled by the gruesome murder of Major Martin in 1701, but since then they had become distracted by their own feuds and complacent about the threat the ever-growing slave population presented. In 1729 a plot was uncovered involving some of the island’s most trusted Negroes (one was a chief slave of Samuel Martin, son of the murdered major, another a senior slave owned by William Codrington, who had retired to England to act the role of absentee landlord). As always, the response was brutal, with three conspirators burned, one hanged, drawn and quartered and 10 others banished. But in fact the conspiracy had been much more widespread than the planters realised, and continued to simmer thereafter.
In 1736 a further, even more extensive slave uprising plot was uncovered in Antigua. Sophisticated plans had been laid for an enormous and deadly explosion to strike at the entire white leadership. One of the plotters had obtained the job of installing the seating for a lavish ball being held to celebrate the anniversary of the King’s coronation. This man was to plant enough gunpowder to blow up the island’s elite in one go, whereupon the slaves would seize the forts and the ships in the harbour and thereby take control. But the grand ball was delayed by two weeks due to the illness of the Governor’s son, and in the meantime the plot was betrayed. Six offenders were hanged (or, possibly, gibbeted alive), five broken on the wheel, 42 banished, and no fewer than 77 burnt alive. Nearly 50 of those put to death were skilled artisans. The killing only stopped when the treasury ran out of money to compensate the owners. Two of the slaves burnt at the stake – Oliver and Scipio – had come from Abraham Redwood’s labour force at Cassada Gardens. At last, at the end of 1736, Redwood decided to return to Antigua to put his affairs in order.
In spite of the severe difficulties faced by his plantation business, and by the island as a whole, the 26-year-old Redwood, having left his young family behind in Newport, appears to have had a highly enjoyable time in the unbuttoned atmosphere of Antigua. It may have been a relief to escape from what must have been a grief-stricken and gloomy Redwood household in Newport. In 1735 a daughter, Elizabeth, had been born, but she died within months. The following year, their eldest son, eight-year-old Abraham, also died.
Redwood, young, rich and with lucrative jobs in his gift, was given a warm welcome by the coterie of young Byams, Langfords, Martins and the handful of others who made up his generation of the Antigua planter elite. There was an almost continual round of dinners and dances. Redwood was soon writing to his friend David Cheeseborough, left in charge of his affairs in Newport, to send out some dancing ‘pumps’. Cheeseborough complied with ‘4 paire of fine Pumps’, but with a slight warning: ‘we are concerned least [you] should stay to Dance out the fine Pumps. Your spouse was very unwilling they should be sent.’
Abraham Redwood was now also launching himself into the slave trade, ordering the fitting out of a Newport sloop, the Martha and Jane, and sending her to Africa to bring him slaves direct to Antigua. It appears that the first voyage was not a success. Cheeseborough wrote to him soon afterwards, urging him not to take on another ‘Guinea voyage’, as the proceeds had not covered the cost of fitting out the vessel. The Martha and Jane, he wrote, ‘was an Unlucky Changeable Beast’. Instead Redwood should load the boat with his plantation produce and return home: ‘it would be to our satisfaction who all long to See you once more’, he said. ‘Her Load would doubtless pay all your debts and put a good Sum in your pocket which I know you are determined upon.’
Redwood ignored this advice and persisted with the trade. But his wife was determined to get him back to Newport. In early February 1739, Redwood’s father-in-law wrote to him that ‘thy wife has beene very much out of order … I would have the consider to they selfe what a vast deale of troble she must needs meat with in living without a husband three years … thy wife cant compose her selfe to write at present’. Abraham relented and promised to return in the spring. ‘You have raised our Expectations of Seeing you by your promises pray let them not faile at last’, pleaded a letter soon afterwards from Cheeseborough. Redwood’s wife, he said, ‘is got pretty well … but thinks her Self not able to write to you’.
After fond farewells, Redwood left Antigua for the last time in April 1739. Shortly afterwards he received a letter from John Tomlinson on the island, which gives an indication of the sort of social life he was leaving behind: after masculine banter about Redwood receiving ‘pleasure & delight’ from ‘a Fond Wife, after a long absence’, he continued, ‘Last night Major Byam, your cousin Jonas, Samll Martin, Warner Tempest and self tasted your Burgundy and Champaigne, not forgetting the Founder … your cousin I think was never drunker in his life.’
Abraham Redwood continued his slave-trading operations after his return to Newport. Correspondence in 1740 indicates that Francis Pope, the man entrusted by Redwood to skipper his ship, buy slaves on the African coast and then sell them in Antigua, was poor as a salesman and a sailor. On 23 April 1740 he arrived in Antigua with 76 slaves, which would have been a fairly full cargo for a vessel the size of the Martha and Jane. But 21 of them, Redwood’s friend Tomlinson reported, were ‘in the Old Condition, Carted up to your Estate, the rest ordinary enough’. More than half remained unsold. ‘For God’s sake think no more of Guinny’, wrote Tomlinson. Another friend made in Antigua, Thomas Gunthorpe, wrote to Redwood in July, ‘I am heartilly sorry Pope has againe made you so bad a voyage too and from the Coast of Guinea Especially as I am given to understand you have made a considerable purchase of lands in Rhode Island and depend in a greater measure upon the returns of your Guinea cargo to fulfil your engagements therein … pursue the Guinea trade no further, under the direction of Capt. Pope.’
A month after landing, Pope still had ‘nineteen slaves unsold’. By the end of June they were all at last sold, but there was still a problem: ‘the people hear in General is very Backward in paying there debts … I meat with a great dile of troble and dissapointment in getting my money.’ Indeed, the planters were notoriously bad payers. Earlier, the Company of Royal Adventures Trading to Africa decided to offer its Caribbean debts to the highest bidder, but they were so toxic they had few takers.
Redwood seems to have thereafter avoided the trade, buying his slaves in Antigua or in Rhode Island. In the 1750s, however, the business would be reactivated, under the management of his sons. In the meantime, Redwood concentrated instead on giving directions for the improvement of Cassada Gardens, and on flaunting his wealth in Newport. Happily for him, the slump in sugar price ended in about 1740, and over much of the sugar-producing Caribbean the rich times returned.
21
THE MAROON WAR IN JAMAICA AND THE WAR OF JENKINS’S EAR
‘That the Negros here use Naturall (or Diabolical) Magick no planter in Barbados doubts, but how they doe it none of us knows.’
Letter from a white farmer in Barbados, 1712
Jamaica had suffered during the slump of the 1730s, but because of its greater space for growing provisions and heavier rainfall, it experienced nothing like the hunger of Antigua. But it had its own severe problem with its slave workforce.
This centred on the continuing existence of the maroons, communities in the interior of Jamaica originally composed of runaway slaves and surviving ‘Indians’ from the Spanish era, but now largely made up of those who had escaped from slavery on the English plantations. On the western, leeward side of the island, a permanent settlement had grown up in the isolated and inaccessible ‘cockpit country’ on the border of Trelawny parish and St James. This had become known
as Cudjoe’s Town, after the leader of the main band. Cudjoe himself seems to have been a pragmatist – he had no interest in attracting the attention of the heavily armed white population of the coastal regions, and for a long time kept his 500 or so followers under strict control, concentrating on expelling rival groups rather than antagonising the plantation owners.
On the eastern, windward side, another concentration of maroons had been formed from a nucleus of those who had taken part in the rebellion of 1690 and had fled to the high mountains above Kingston. The chaos caused by the French invasion of a few years later had swelled their numbers. Their base was Nanny Town, a mountain fastness like that of the leeward maroons, although surrounded by 100 acres of land ‘well planted with provisions’. The town was named after a near-mythological figure – Nanny, a black woman who was credited with supernatural powers, including the ability to catch the bullets fired at her by British troops in her buttocks and then fart them back at her enemies.
This group, led by Captain Quao, was much more troublesome. As early as 1702, Lieutenant-Governor Colonel Beckford was writing to London that ‘rebellious negroes … have been so bold to come down armed and attack our out settlements to Windward’. Colonel Beckford had sent out four parties, one of which, consisting of only 20 men, had fought for six hours against 300 maroons: ‘the negroes faced our men so long as they had any ammunition left, and wounded three of our party. We killed and took several.’ Outlying maroon settlements were burned, but the threat was far from extinguished.
The Sugar Barons Page 32