The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  Sugar planters had always borrowed money. Many plantation operations were carried on essentially by credit based upon anticipated income from the next crop. Huge advances had been secured with ease, and this often led to great extravagance, and the brushing aside of natural caution in financial matters, engendering a spirit of speculation without due regard for the actual risk involved.

  But by the 1770s, planters in Grenada alone owed something like £2,000,000, a vast amount of money. In all, the ceded islands were a huge drain on capital and credit, and this contributed to the 1772 collapse of a large Scottish bank and the ensuing credit crisis.

  There were also huge debts in Jamaica. Sir Charles Price, an almost pre-eminent figure in Jamaican politics since the 1740s, had by the 1770s accumulated more than 26,000 acres across 11 parishes. But such expansion was more a symptom of megalomania than sound business sense. The plantations were severely burdened by debt, and on the cusp of reclamation by mortgage holders. Sir Charles now preferred to live at the Decoy, a mansion 2,000 feet up in the hills of St Mary parish. Here he entertained visitors from England, who could enjoy the surrounding park, grazed by imported fallow deer, in a weird, totally inappropriate mimic of the aristocracy at home. In front of the house was ‘a very fine piece of water, which in winter is commonly stocked with wild-duck and teal’, a visitor reported. Behind was an elegant garden, with numerous richly ornamented buildings and a triumphal arch. Here at the Decoy, Sir Charles would live out his final years before his death in 1772, shielded from the world and his collapsing fortune.

  His son, the second baronet, also Charles, moved to England in 1775, intending never to return to Jamaica. But the financial difficulties of the Jamaica plantations brought him back, and he died on the island in 1788. Eight years later, a Kingston magazine described the Prices as ‘that respectable but unfortunate family’.

  In other ways the sugar barons were losing their lustre. In 1776, the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith published his hugely influential The Wealth of Nations, in which he argued in favour of free trade and against mercantilism, the policy whereby British sugar was given an effective monopoly on the home market in return for using British ships and buying British manufactures. The first sugar barons had hated the Navigation Acts, but by the middle of the eighteenth century, the protected British market that was part of the original deal was of overwhelming importance to the British sugar producers. Because of soil exhaustion and a failure to invest in new technologies, the British islands now needed four times the labour to produce the same sugar as the newer French possessions, led in production by St Domingue. This, of course, made British sugar more expensive, thus the British consumer paid up to 30 per cent more for his sugar than customers in other parts of Europe. A pamphleteer of 1761 estimated that what he called the ‘fraudulent Trading of the Sugar Planters’ had deprived the kingdom of ‘over and above Twelve Million Pounds Sterling’.

  In some ways, the mercantilist policy had undoubted benefits for the nation. The system guaranteed supply of the commodity and profits at home from processing and, until the European market was lost to the French, re-exporting it. An overseas market was secured for finished British goods (exports to all the American colonies expanded by over 2,000 per cent during the eighteenth century); and it supported the growth of the civil (and military) marine. Substantial duties were paid when the sugar arrived at a British port, even if they were much lower than for other tropical products.

  But the cost of the preferential duties was paid by the British consumer, and the costs of administration and defence of the colonies by the British taxpayer. The mercantilist policy might have tied the colonies to the mother country, but in the final reckoning economically it did little more than provide income for the government and enrich a special interest group. Adam Smith declared that ‘the interest of the home-consumer has been sacrificed to that of the producer with a more extravagant profusion than in all our other commercial regulations’.

  The system had also, of course, severely limited the development of the West Indian islands. Industry was strongly discouraged as part of the mercantile system. Market towns and ports were all that could develop. Jamaica had to import processed white sugar from England, as its two tiny refineries could not even satisfy domestic demand. Cushioned by the ever-rising demand for their product and by the home market monopoly, those planters still on the islands, rather than the absentees, stagnated, and the energy and verve of their fathers and grandfathers ebbed and slipped away. If the market for sugar was ‘unreal’, so were the islands’ economies, now an artificial creation, sustained by political intervention rather than the true market price for their product. But still sugar monoculture expanded. By the late eighteenth century, sugar accounted for 93 per cent of Barbados’s exports.

  Adam Smith also argued in favour of free labour. To increase the productivity of their workers, slave-owners could not sack them or lower their wages, but could only whip them. With no property, Smith wrote, the only impulse is to eat as much as possible and do as little work as possible. ‘From the experience of all ages and nations’, he concluded, ‘I believe that the work done by slaves is in the end the dearest of any.’ This argument would provide ammunition to the abolitionists, emerging by the time of Adam Smith’s book as the greatest threat to the sugar barons.

  The first half of the eighteenth century in Britain, like the 30 years before, saw only isolated and unrepresentative voices raised in opposition to slavery. The London yearly meeting of the Society of Friends in 1727 produced a resolution that condemned the slave trade and censured Quakers who participated in it. The effects were negligible, but for the Friends a course had been set. After 1761, British Quakers who persisted in the trade were excluded from the Society, and in 1768, Quakers unsuccessfully petitioned Parliament to abolish the slave trade.

  The mid-eighteenth century was a period of rising material wealth and improved education for the middle class, who now had time to read philosophy, politics and travel literature, as well as the burgeoning new magazines and newspapers. Broadly speaking, ‘Enlightenment’ writers and thinkers were opposed to slavery. Montesquieu wrote in 1748: ‘The State of Slavery is in its own nature bad. It is neither useful to the master nor to the slave.’ Rousseau condemned slavery in a work of 1755, and in his Social Contract of 1762. Diderot’s Encylopedia, in the volume published in 1765, condemned slavery as ‘a business which violates religion, morality, natural law, and all human rights’. In Voltaire’s Candide (1759), his hero observes a young slave who had an arm and a leg cut off as the price demanded for the sugar sent to Europe. (Quite rightly, slavery was associated with sugar: two thirds of all American slaves worked for the sugar barons.)

  One of the most popular plays of the eighteenth century was a dramatisation of Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko. First published in 1696, it tells of the capture of an African prince and his brutal treatment as a slave in Surinam. Sweetened with a sensational and tragic love story, the piece fascinated audiences for 100 years and prepared literary types for humanitarian opposition to slavery. The author of ‘Rule Britannia’, the Scottish poet James Thomson, would publish in his Seasons in 1730 a poem describing a slave ship being followed by a shark, waiting for the inevitable casting overboard of dead meat. Pope, in his ‘Essay on Man’, imagined ‘Some happier island … Where slaves once more their native land behold.’ Laurence Sterne and Sir Richard Steele also condemned slavery in their widely read works.

  Perhaps most famously, Dr Samuel Johnson, a giant of the British literary scene, had a lifelong hatred of slavery. In 1756, in the first issue of his new Literary Magazine, he denounced eighteenth-century Jamaica as ‘a place of great wealth and dreadful wickedness, a den of tyrants, and a dungeon of slaves’. In 1759, he wrote a tract attacking the slave trade, and at a ‘grave’ dinner at an Oxford college, he shocked all and sundry by proposing a toast to the ‘success to the next revolt of the negroes in the West Indies’.

  Such
gestures were not about to end chattel slavery on the plantations of the sugar barons. Nor, of course, were poems and plays. Furthermore, many of those thinkers condemning slavery offered few ideas as to what to do about it. But they did create a soil in which later movements could grow.

  The absentee West India nabobs had never been accepted as proper English gentry. Now, increasingly, there seemed something about their money that just did not smell right. In 1769, press references started appearing referring to the new Lord Mayor as ‘negro whipping Beckford’. William Beckford had strongly supported John Wilkes’s battle against the King, fought on the slogan ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’, and founded the radical Middlesex Journal: or chronicle of liberty. The irony was not lost on a satirist writing for the Public Advertiser in November 1769:

  ‘For B … f … d he was chosen May’r,

  A Wight of high Renown,

  To see a slave he could not bear,

  Unless it were his own.’

  Johnson mocked Wilkes for being supported by Beckford, whose attachment to ‘Liberty’ encapsulated the irony that Britain, the freest nation in Europe, was also the world’s biggest slave-trader. Gradually a feeling was growing that the slave societies of the Americas were out of date, ‘made in less enlightened times than our own’, as one early abolitionist put it.

  In 1765, Granville Sharp, a junior clerk in the Ordnance office, had come across a slave, Jonathan Strong, in the streets of London and befriended him. Strong had been badly injured by his master, a David Lisle of Barbados, so much so that Lisle had thrown him out as useless. Sharp restored Strong to health, and got him a job. But Lisle spotted his former slave in the street, had him imprisoned in a private jail, and sold him to a planter in Jamaica for £30. Sharp got him released, but then found himself being sued by the Jamaican planter and challenged to a duel by Lisle. When the case came to court, Sharp successfully persuaded the judge that in England, a slave had to have willingly, in writing, bound himself to his master, and Strong was freed. This victory brought Sharp other similar cases. In 1772, he acted in the same way on behalf of a slave, James Somerset, who had been brought from Jamaica to England by his owner, Charles Stewart of Boston. Somerset escaped, then was recaptured and put on a ship bound for Jamaica, where he was to be sold. Sharp managed to have the case transferred to the King’s Bench, where the presiding judge was Lord Chief Justice Mansfield. Mansfield had in his household a mulatto girl, Dido, daughter of his nephew, Rear Admiral Sir John Lindsay, by a slave mother whom Lindsay had captured during the siege of Havana. After a long trial, Mansfield freed Somerset, declaring ‘The status of slavery is so odious that nothing can be suffered to support it but positive law.’ It was a great victory, interpreted by the public as the prohibition of slavery in Britain. A court in Scotland came to the same verdict six years later.

  John Wesley, who had seen slavery in action in South Carolina, published Thoughts on Slavery in 1774, which had a huge circulation. ‘I absolutely deny all Slave-holding to be consistent with any degree of even natural Justice’, he wrote. Better that the islands be ‘altogether sunk in the depth of the sea, than that they should be cultivated at so high a price as the violation of justice, mercy and truth; and … that myriads of innocent men should be murdered and myriads more dragged into the basest slavery’. Because of the wide appeal of Methodism, with its numbers already far outstripping those of the Quakers, Wesley’s pamphlet constituted the most severe attack yet on slavery.

  In North America, the anti-slavery movement was similarly nurtured by Nonconformist Christians. As early as 1696, Quakers in Pennsylvania advised their members against the slave trade and urged them to bring their blacks to meetings for religious instruction. Nevertheless, prominent Quakers such as Jonathan Dickinson continued to own and trade in slaves.

  John Woolman, a New Jersey Quaker, published his first anti-slavery tract in 1754, and then travelled round the country, including the slave trade centre of Newport, addressing his fellow Quakers, and trying to persuade them of ‘the inconsistency of holding slaves’; the same year came the first of a number of resolutions from Quakers in Pennsylvania condemning the slave trade. In 1764, Anthony Benezet, a Pennsylvania Quaker, published his first propaganda tract against the Atlantic slave trade.

  Benezet liked quoting Montesquieu, and also a visitor to the West Indies who wrote ‘it is a matter of astonishment how a people [the English] who, as a nation are looked upon as generous and humane … can live in the practice of such extreme oppression and inhumanity without seeing the inconsistency of such conduct’. The Quakers, as a movement, were now decided, declaring that it was impossible to be a Friend and a slave-trader or slave-owner. One high-profile casualty of this stand was Abraham Redwood in Newport. On 26 September 1775, they demanded that he free his slaves in Rhode Island and in Antigua. As this would have ended his operation at Cassada Gardens, Redwood refused. ‘Wherefore we’, the Newport Quakers resolved, ‘on that account do Disown him to be any longer a member of our Society.’ Redwood appears to have borne no grudge, bequeathing a substantial sum in his will for the foundation of a Quaker school in Newport.

  Elsewhere, as in Britain, momentum was growing against the trade, and not just among Quakers. In 1774, Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush, a friend of Tom Paine, founded America’s first anti-slavery society. The motives for the change of heart were varied: some were driven by what they interpreted as Christian teachings; others by the economic arguments of the likes of Adam Smith, or by fear that slave societies could only result in a bloodbath of revenge and rebellion. For a number, it was personal experience of the trade that turned them against it.

  Like many in New England, the Brown family from Providence had made a fortune in the West India trade, a lot of it illegal, and in sponsoring privateers during the intermittent warfare between England and Spain or France. Not until 1764, on the prompting of a slave-hungry customer in Virginia, did the brothers, led by John and Moses (Obadiah had died in 1762), invest in their first slave ship, the Sally, a square-rigged brigantine, larger than the sloops and schooners that made up the rest of the family fleet. The vessel was stocked with 17,000 gallons of rum and was captained by Esek Hopkins, later first commodore of the United States Navy and brother to Stephen Hopkins, Rhode Island’s great revolutionary leader and theorist. Esek Hopkins was an experienced mariner, but knew nothing of the delicate processes of bribery and negotiation that were required in West Africa. He spent far too long searching for slaves to buy – more than nine months. All the time he remained on the coast he was at risk from disease and slave insurrections, and by the time he left, he had already lost two crew members and 20 slaves, several of whom hanged themselves from the rigging.

  During the course of the ‘Middle Passage’ to their destination at Antigua, there were deaths almost daily. ‘1 boye slave Dyed’, Hopkins wrote on 25 August in a typical entry in the vessel’s account book. Partly at fault were the filthy conditions on the Sally. The women, mostly naked, lived unchained on the quarterdeck. The males, chained together in pairs, were kept below deck, where they struggled for air in the dark, humid hold. Their spaces were so cramped they were unable to sit up. In good weather, Hopkins and his crew exercised the more than 100 African slaves on deck and had their filthy quarters scrubbed with water and vinegar. Then, eight days after leaving the coast of Africa, Hopkins unchained some of the male slaves to help with the chores. Instead, they freed other slaves and turned on what was left of his crew. Outnumbered, the sailors grabbed some of the weapons aboard the Sally: four pistols, seven swivel guns, 13 cutlasses and two blunderbusses. The curved cutlass blades and short-barrelled blunderbusses, favoured by pirates and highwaymen, were ideal weapons for killing enemies at close quarters. According to a report in the Newport Mercury, ‘by letters from Capt. Hopkins’, the slaves were ‘happily prevented’ from getting possession of the vessel ‘by the captain, who killed, wounded and forced overboard eighty of them which obliged the rest to submit’.

&nb
sp; After the failure of the revolt, the survivors, Hopkins wrote, ‘were so dispirited that some drowned themselves, some starved and others sickened and died’. Those still alive by the time the Sally reached Antigua were so emaciated that they only fetched about £5 each.

  Slave-traders were used to losing up to 15 per cent of their human cargo, but Hopkins had lost more than half. The venture cost the Brown brothers a fortune. Neither the grisly death toll nor the financial loss deterred John Brown from further involvement in slave-trading. But for Moses, always the more sensitive and thoughtful of the two, it was an epiphany. Thereafter, he refused to play any part in the trade, joined the Quakers, and in 1773 freed his own six slaves with generous pay-offs, including use of his land. He also launched himself into campaigning to outlaw slavery in Rhode Island.

  By the time of Moses Brown’s conversion, the North American colonies were in turmoil. Towards the end of the Seven Years War, with North American trade with the French so blatant that insurance rates for voyages to St Domingue were openly quoted in Rhode Island and elsewhere, the British sought to resurrect the largely defunct Molasses Act. The entire customs operation in North America was strengthened and overhauled, with informants richly rewarded, smuggling loopholes closed, and new provisions made for search and seizure. These measures, wrote the Governor of Massachusetts to an official in London, ‘caused a greater alarm in this Country than the taking of Fort William Henry did in 1757’.

  The aim of the Molasses Act of 1733 had been to make foreign molasses prohibitively expensive for the rum distillers of New England. Now it was proposed by the indebted government in London to put through a new Sugar Act, designed instead to raise revenue. Duty on foreign molasses would be reduced from six pence a gallon to three pence, but the collection would now be rigorously enforced, with fresh regulations imposed, including new procedures in the vice-admiralty courts, which removed the right to trial by jury.