The Sugar Barons

by Matthew Parker

  John remained the foremost defender in Rhode Island of the slave trade, while his brother Moses emerged as one of its fiercest opponents. When in 1800 Congress passed an Act to strengthen the law of 1794, John Brown was one of only five House of Representatives members to vote against the bill, and also spoke in opposition to it.

  The same year, Moses Brown wrote a letter that sought to explain his brother’s behaviour. Long ago, he wrote, referring to the disastrous experience of the Sally, John ‘Drew his Brothers with him into a Voyage in that Unrighteous Traffic … happily they and I may say we Lived to Regret it, and to Labour to have it Relinquished in this State; but my Brother John … most Unhappily … has often appeared in Support of a Trade [because of] his Love of Money and Anxiety to acquire it’.

  In England, the absentee sugar barons fought a vigorous and expensive rearguard action against the march of abolition. In 1793, Thomas Wildman warned his brother James that Beckford of Fonthill was calling for ‘large supplies’ from his Jamaica plantations to ‘exert himself to support the West India Int. in the next Parliament’. Jack Fuller, elected as a Sussex MP in the early 1800s, rushed to Parliament during an abolition debate, and there made a huge uproar, swore at the Speaker, whom he called ‘the insignificant little fellow in the wig’, and was publicly reprimanded for the offence. The latest Lascelles, Henry, whose family had called in their debts and were now major landholders in the West Indies, stood against Wilberforce in Hull, and lost, in spite of spending a fortune. Draxes and Codringtons were also represented in the anti-abolition group in Parliament.

  After the waning of interest in the ‘plight of the Negro’ in the late 1790s, in 1803 the publicising of lurid accounts of the torture of blacks in Trinidad – taken over by the British in 1797 – reignited protest. In 1804, Clarkson, after a period of illness, resumed his campaigning work and the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade began meeting again, strengthened by prominent new members such as Zachary Macaulay.

  Macaulay, father of the historian, had gone out to Jamaica in 1784, and worked as a bookkeeper. ‘I was exposed not only to the sight, but also to the practice of severities over others, the very recollection of which makes my blood run cold’, he later wrote. He recalled that at first, he was ‘feelingly alive to the miseries of the poor slaves’, but that he had resolved to ‘get rid of my squeamishness as soon as I could … And in this I had a success beyond my expectations … now I was callous and indifferent.’ He returned to England in 1794 and, under the influence of his evangelical brother-in-law, converted to abolitionism, contributing to the campaign his first-hand experience of slavery.

  In June 1804, a new Bill proposed by Wilberforce to abolish the slave trade successfully passed all its stages through the House of Commons. However, it was too late in the parliamentary session for it to complete its passage through the House of Lords. On its reintroduction during the 1805 session it was defeated. But during the general election of autumn 1806, slavery was an issue, resulting in many more abolitionist MPs being returned.

  William, Lord Grenville, the Prime Minister, was determined to introduce an Abolition Bill, but decided to do so in the House of Lords first, where it faced its greatest challenge. When it came to a vote, however, the measure passed by a large margin. A second reading was scheduled for the Commons on 23 February 1807. As tributes were made to Wilberforce, whose face streamed with tears, the Bill was carried by 283 votes to 16. The Slave Trade Act received royal assent on 25 March 1807, and came into force on 1 January 1808.

  In the West Indies, the measure did, as had been hoped, lead to sensible planters treating their enslaved workforces better. It also pretty much ended manumission and saw the beginning of mass importation of indentured ‘coolie’ labour from south-east Asia. Inevitably, the costs of producing sugar rose sharply.

  William Beckford of Fonthill had already seen his income from Jamaica dwindle. By 1805 it had fallen from more than £100,000 to somewhere in the region of £30,000. But almost as if it was ‘dirty money’, he was still spending at a colossal rate. In 1796 he had engaged the country’s leading architect, James Wyatt, to build him an abbey at Fonthill to rival the grandeur of nearby Salisbury Cathedral.

  Fonthill Abbey was to be vast, with a cruciform shape 312 feet from north to south, the same as Westminster Abbey, and 270 feet west to east, with an enormous tower. Soon 700 men were at work, throwing up a structure the like of which had taken the cathedral builders of the Middle Ages decades to construct. The following year, the first spring gale brought the tower crashing down. But work pressed on. Wyatt told a friend that he reckoned Beckford was spending £120,000 a year, mainly on the abbey. In 1800, the tower collapsed again, Beckford’s only regret reportedly being that he was not there to see it happen. By the summer of 1807, although far from finished, parts were ready for habitation, and Beckford moved into the south wing. Access was through huge oak doors, 30 feet high and weighing more than a ton. These would be opened to visitors by Beck-ford’s dwarf, dressed in gold and embroidery, his tiny and somewhat grotesque figure accentuating the size of the doors.

  The same year, Beckford had his father’s Splendens pulled down, in spite of protests from Wyatt and others that it was a classical masterpiece. The elaborate formal gardens were also ripped up, to be replaced with landscaping more to Beckford’s Gothic taste.

  Fonthill Abbey was, like Jack Fuller’s sugar loaf, or the Draxes’ tower, a folly, but on a massively grand scale. Inside it was very uncomfortable and impractical. The kitchen was situated a huge distance from the oak parlour where Beckford took his meals. There were 18 bedrooms for the guests who seldom if ever came, only reachable by twisting staircases and corridors, and 13 were so small, poky and ill-ventilated as to be unusable. The whole structure was so cold and damp that 60 fires had to be kept burning, even in the summer.

  There was also something irredeemably fake and hollow about the whole thing. If anyone looked closely at the furniture, they could see that many of Beckford’s ‘James I’ coffers were obviously nothing of the kind. The ebony state bed that ‘belonged to Henry VII’ was seventeenth century; ebony chairs that had ‘belonged to Cardinal Wolsey’ were made in the East Indies also in the seventeenth century. A cabinet ‘designed by Holbein’ was clearly built a century after the artist’s death. Everywhere there were ‘ancestral’ Beckford coats of arms – on windows, vault bosses and fabrics. An elaborate family tree had been drawn up – Beckford, it fortuitously emerged, was descended from the royal blood of Scotland, and from King Edward III of England.

  By 1812, with most of the originally planned structure complete at huge expense, Beckford ordered a new wing be built, even though the Wild-mans were still merrily embezzling the profits of his Jamaica plantations. Then, in 1821, he was forced to sell his Drax Hall and Harborhead estates for £62,000 to partially offset an estimated debt of £125,000 on Fonthill Abbey.

  The following year, he suddenly got bored with the whole enterprise, and put Fonthill and much of his collection of art and objets, including 20,000 books, up for public auction. This generated huge excitement and curiosity, with 72,000 copies of the contents brochure printed by Christie’s sold at a guinea each.

  The Times commented in reaction that Beckford’s collection marked him as ‘one of the very few possessors of great wealth who have honestly tried to spend it poetically’. Essayist William Hazlitt was less complimentary, writing that Fonthill and its contents were ‘a desert of magnificence, a glittering waste of laborious idleness, a cathedral turned into a toy shop, an immense museum of all that is most curious and costly and at the same time most worthless … the only proof of taste he has shown in the collection is his getting rid of it’.

  Two days before the sale was to be held, everything was bought by a private bidder, a gullible nouveau riche East Indies trader with more money than sense. Three years after the sale, the grand tower collapsed once more, for the last time, in a cloud of cheap mortar.

  Ho
wever, the proceeds of the sale, some £330,000, allowed Beckford to clear his debts – estimated at £145,000 – and to live out the rest of his days in idleness at a grand house in Bath. He kept his favourite paintings by Titian, Rembrandt, Bronzino, Holbein and Velasquez, as well as the portrait of his father by Reynolds and of himself by Romney. His whim in his latter years was to have the dinner table laid elaborately each day for a number of guests but to dine in solitary state. He was having problems with his teeth and his bladder, and was steadily losing his Jamaican properties through Chancery suits to the Wildmans. When he died in 1844, lonely and eccentric, the unprecedented Beckford fortune built up by his father, grandfather and great-grandfather, on the back of the labour of thousands of slaves under the burning Jamaican sky, had all been frittered away.

  In the West Indies, there was an almost palpable sense of decline in the years following the abolition of the slave trade. The sugar price rose briefly in 1814–15, but by 1822 had fallen by half, as sugar from newly exploited territories in Cuba, Mauritius and India started flooding the market. A visitor to Bridgetown at this time described it as ‘having an antique appearance … what strikes the stranger’s attention is the number of old women, cats, and parrots’. A writer on Jamaica from around the same time noticed how ‘bad times and untoward events’ had curbed even the planters’ ‘natural tendency to extravagance’.

  As the British state, at huge expense, undertook to fight the international slave trade, an organised movement for the ‘Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery’ was inaugurated at the beginning of 1823. Once again, a vigorous campaign saw Parliament flooded with petitions. In the same year came a concerted attempt by East India traders, now importing sugar but not enjoying the favourable duties granted to Caribbean produce, to break the West Indians’ monopoly rights. From the start there was close cooperation between the two campaigns. The power of the West India lobby was still strong, but not enough to face both these attacks at the same time. A new boycott of West Indian products was launched, and the government ordered a general registration of all slaves on the islands and drew up rules for their treatment. Both moves were bitterly resisted by the islands’ assemblies, particularly in Jamaica.

  The slaves themselves, a number of whom, thanks to the efforts of Nonconformist ministers on the islands – Moravians, Baptists and Methodists – could now read the newspapers, viewed these measures as a prelude to emancipation. When at first their hopes were dashed, a number decided to follow the example of the slaves of St Domingue. In 1816 there was a major rebellion in previously peaceful Barbados, followed by an even more serious disorder in Jamaica in late 1831 that saw the deaths of 1,000 slaves and damage approaching a million pounds.

  To blame, most white Jamaicans decided, were the growing number of Nonconformist ministers who had been educating and converting the islands’ slaves. Nine Baptist and six Methodist chapels were attacked and destroyed, and Baptist preacher William Knibb and four others were imprisoned. The ministers were later released, but the mob violence did nothing to endear the planters to the authorities at home, already angry at the resistance to their amelioration instructions and concerned that the next slave rebellion might actually suceed. Britain was now turning against its Caribbean colonists.

  After intense public agitation against slavery, the election that followed the Great Reform Act in 1832 brought many more MPs into Parliament who were committed to the abolition of slavery. In May 1833, the Whig government introduced the Bill for the Abolition of Slavery. To ensure its passage, several large concessions were made: only those aged under six were to be freed straight away; other slaves would have to work out a period of unpaid ‘apprenticeship’ – effective slavery – for up to six years. Slaveowners would be compensated for their ‘loss’, the total sum allocated for this being around £20 million, a vast amount, equivalent to 40 per cent of the government’s annual budget. In August, the House of Lords passed the Slavery Abolition Act, which ended slavery in the British Empire, effective from August 1834.

  The system of apprenticeship was never workable and collapsed four years later. Thus it was on 1 August 1838 when the 800,000 slaves of the British Empire, the vast majority of whom were in the West Indies, were truly freed.

  The Baptist minister William Knibb held a service on the night of 31 July in his church in Falmouth, Jamaica. The walls were hung with branches, flowers, and portraits of Wilberforce and fellow abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. Into a coffin inscribed ‘Colonial Slavery, died July 31st, 1838, aged 276’, church members placed an iron punishment collar, a whip and chains. ‘The hour is at hand!’ Knibb called out from his pulpit, pointing to a clock on the wall. ‘The monster is dead!’ The congregation burst into cheers and embraced each other. ‘Never, never did I hear such a sound’, Knibb wrote. ‘The winds of freedom appeared to have been let loose. The very building shook at the strange yet sacred joy.’

  Contrary to the hopes of Adam Smith, abolition failed to provide a willing and able free labour force in the British West Indies. Almost immediately after abolition, the survival rate for black births and the life expectancy of African West Indians shot up, but many black former sugar workers turned their backs on the plantations and toil that would for ever carry the stigma of slavery. Canefields were left untended, and soon became overgrown with weeds. Attempts to replace the workforce with indentured Asians had indifferent success. Costs for the plantation owners rose, and profits dwindled.

  But the decline and fall of the planters, and of the ‘first British empire’, was caused by more than abolition alone. Intermittent but often devastating war had taken a heavy toll on lives and property. Relentless disease and periodic intense natural disasters had made the islands a personal and financial risk no longer worth the returns. To blame, also, was the split with the North American colonies, curtailing a trading relationship of great benefit to both sides – but not London. The agricultural system in the British islands was moribund, and too often in the hands of disinterested managers. Competition from newly exploited tropical territories, such as Java and Madagascar, along with cheaper slave-grown product from Brazil, Dutch Surinam and Cuba, drove the sugar price ever downwards. At the same time, a growing sentiment towards free trade undermined the protectionism on which the wasteful system had long relied. To cap it all, the end of the 1820s saw a burgeoning of the beet sugar industry in Europe. As decay became every day more apparent, so disillusionment and malaise set in among the British planters.

  The continued resistance of the enslaved population had also contributed to the collapse of the world of the plantation, but in truth, as a society it had failed long before. Slavery, ‘an inferior social and economic organisation of exploiters and exploited’, had sacrificed human life and its most precious values to the pursuit of immediate gain. The sugar-and-slave business had encouraged greed, hypocrisy, fear and brutality, corrupting almost everyone it touched.

  The sugar money, flashed around in England, had never smelt quite right. Now, for many in Britain, the whole West Indian imperial adventure stank, and was cause for national regret. The poet Robert Southey, brother of a naval officer stationed in tropical American waters early in the nineteenth century, expressed a view widely held in England, describing the colonies as ‘perhaps as disgraceful a portion of history as the whole course of time can afford; for I know not that there is anything generous, anything ennobling, anything honorable or consolatory to human nature to relieve it, except what may relate to the missionaries’.

  Instead, Britain’s imperial focus, the ambitions of her brightest and best, had for a while been turning east. The West India planter, flaunting his wealth, was yesterday’s man. The new grandees were the East India nabobs, and on the horizon was a more nuanced form of imperialism, which attempted to combine the sugar empire’s greed and exploitation with an urge to ‘civilise’ – to convert, educate and thus subject in a subtler way than the overt racial slavery, the shameful and shaming imperialism, ‘red in tooth
and claw’, of the Sugar Barons.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I am grateful to the K. Blundell Trust, administered by the Society of Authors, for a grant towards the costs of researching this book.

  My greatest debt is to the scholars who have produced a rich academic literature on West Indian history, including transcriptions of key documents. Their help with identifying and interpreting the primary sources has been very valuable.

  Writing about West Indian history has, unsurprisingly, been dominated by a concern with slavery and, influenced in part by the nature of a lot of the source material, with the economics of the plantation system. For this reason, I have tried to focus on other aspects of the time, although, of course, neither can be ignored, and specialists on these topics have also helped shape this book. In particular, I would like to acknowledge my great debt to (and recommend as further reading): Susan Amussen, Bernard Bailyn, Hilary Beckles, the Bridenbaughs, Vincent Brown, Trevor Burnard (especially), Linda Colley, Michael Craton, Noel Deerr, Richard Dunn, David Eltis, David Galenson, Larry Gragg, Douglas Hall, Vincent Harlow, Russell Menard, Sidney Mintz, Vere Oliver, Andrew O’Shaughnessy, Gabriel Paquette, Richard Pares, Lowell Ragatz, Richard Sheridan, Simon Smith, Peter Thompson, Karl Watson and Eric Williams.

  I am grateful to all the academics who shared their research and gave this project encouragement, as well as others who sent me letters or pictures, or provided leads and contacts: Tim Anderson; David Beasley, Librarian, The Goldsmiths Company; Chris Codrington of Florida; Professor Madge Dresser; Michael Hamilton; Charles Freedland; Maya Jasanoff, Steve Jervis; Louisa Parker; Victoria Perry; Derek Seaton; Paul Vlitos; Brian Wessely.