Monmouth UniversityWest Long Branch, New Jersey

Graduate Thesis in World History

Macaulay’s Mirror:

Myths, Martyrs, and White Slaves in the Early Atlantic World

Kevin Champion YoungDecember, 2011

Advisor: Prof. M. Rhett

Readers: Prof. K. CampbellProf. C. DeRosa

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Thesis

This thesis seeks to establish, confirm, or deny the

existence of white English slaves serving white English masters

on West Indies plantations during the reign of James II, circa

1685, as reported in Lord Macaulay’s History of England.

Additionally, the work strives to document the lives and fates of

those slaves, if such they were, whose contributions to the

formation of the plantation complex in the Atlantic world

profoundly affected the course of European imperial expansion in

numerous ways, including the transition to pre-industrial

capitalism; the end of manorial serfdom, birth of contract labor,

and adoption of African slavery; the evolution of European

cultural consciousness of race, ethnicity, and nationalism; and

many other areas. Macaulay’s propagandist discussion, or Whig

martyrology, of the Stuart enslavement of the Duke of Monmouth’s

Rebels seems strange, in that it contradicts the traditional

depiction of colonial indentured servitude as a benign career

opportunity. This subject provides an ideal test platform for the

cultural micro-history approach of historian Robert Darnton,

whose “taste for strangeness” often produces “some positive

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effects, if only as an antidote to false historical

consciousness.” The forgotten lives of these subaltern subjects

could provide what Darnton refers to as “curious, out-of-the-way

corners.”1 It is possible that in these dark corners lie

important truths about collective English consciousness in the

seventeenth century. In understanding that consciousness, the

origins of politicized distortions, such as the pervasive

unifying myths of national and racial superiority, may be

discerned, and the false historical consciousness surrounding

the origins of servitude and slavery, both in theory and in

practice, may be dispelled.

1. Introduction

“We interrogate the past in vain. General rules are useless where the whole is one vast exception.”2

A nineteenth-century author, attempting to unravel and

document his ancestor’s 1623 colonization of St. Christopher, the

first English colony in the West Indies, discovered that “West

1 Robert Darnton, George Washington’s False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century (NY: W. W. Norton & Co., 2003): x-xi.

2 Lord Macaulay, “Government of India,” in Speeches on Politics and Literature, Everyman’s Library Edition, 95-126. Introduction by William Ewart Gladstone (London: J. M. Dent & Co., 1924): 106.

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Indian history is singularly rich in false dates, baseless

assumptions, and contradictory statements. On some points the

confusion of authorities is unspeakably perplexing to the

inquirer.”3 Over a century later, distinguished scholar and Nobel

Laureate Derek Walcott, a multiracial descendent of Afro-West

Indians, described the “way the Caribbean is still looked at,

[as] illegitimate, rootless, mongrelized...” The history of the

region, he felt, was a “process of renaming” that formed the

“basis of the Antillean experience, this shipwreck of fragments…

these echoes of real people, unoriginal and broken.”4 It is

indeed perplexing that two such different characters, separated

by an ocean of time and space, should agree on anything: this is

the paradox of the Antillean experience, the foundation of a

global empire built on captivity, coercion, and death. Many

people were, literally and figuratively speaking, shipwrecked and

broken on plantations in the West Indies beginning in the late

fifteenth century. Attempts to reconstruct their lives have

3 Christopher Jeaffreson, A Young Squire of the Seventeenth Century: From the Papers (A.D. 1676-1686) of Christopher Jeaffreson of Dullingham House, Cambridgeshire , edited by John Cordy Jeaffreson (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1878): 29-30.

4 Derek Walcott, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory. The Nobel Lecture. (London: Faber and Faber Limited, 1993): 7-11.

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historically been riddled with baseless assumptions and

contradictory statements. The fragments of their lives have been

renamed and manipulated by political propagandists, sociologists,

legal experts, economists, and others who have all sought to

interpret history from one generation to the next.

The conventional understanding of the plantation complex and

the Atlantic triangular trade has emphasized the racial dichotomy

of white European masters and black African slaves producing

commodities amid complex financial networks. It was an

arrangement that generated great wealth and gave rise to pre-

industrial capitalism, European imperial expansion, and modern

race relations, inter alia. The bulk of modern Atlantic World

scholarship has focused almost exclusively on this polarized

perspective; yet there were other groups, less studied, and about

whom little is known, including the native inhabitants of the

Caribbean, as well as servants from England and other parts of

Europe.

Most of what is known about white servants has been deduced

from legal codes enacted to establish and regulate control over

them by their masters only after decades of practice. A handful

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of written personal accounts of former white servants survive,

many of which were dismissed as exaggerations or propaganda by

contemporaries for reasons that will become clear below. Most

white servants are put in the category of indentured servants, a

term that traditionally denotes a voluntary labor contract for

migrant workers who made up the vast majority of European

immigrants to the Americas.5 The indenture was advertised as a

career opportunity, which it was in a very loose sort of way. For

the unemployed it meant a chance to start a new life, albeit a

very risky one. For convicted criminals and political prisoners

it was a reprieve from execution, often simply deferred. For

countless thousands of kidnap victims, especially children, it 5 A majority of twentieth-century scholars maintained that anywhere from

one-half to three quarters of immigrants to the Americas were “servants,” a term that properly understood refers to various degrees of bonded servitude, including and not separate from slavery. See Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607-1776 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1947): 33-36. At least one recent scholar, however, contends that “…labor in the colonies was not primarily unfree. Bound workers made up only a small portion of the English migrant stream…” In James D. Schmidt, Review: Christopher Tomlins, “Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 116, No. 4 (Oct., 2011): 1078. Even a cursory review of the original early seventeenth-century land grants and patents in the mid-Atlantic coloniesreveals that nearly every settler arrived with servants, both white and black;at no time during the seventeenth century did free whites outnumber the servant and slave populations in the West Indies. Schmidt claims that Tomlinspresents “loads of data;” however, the first reliable census was that of Barbados in 1679-80; according to Richard S. Dunn, even those figures were questionable. This contradiction is typical of historical analysis of the early Atlantic world.

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meant forced migration and, in the parlance of the seventeenth

century, rough usage, or extreme hardship. For a few aspiring

craftsmen or artisans it was a sort of apprenticeship that

afforded the participant a degree of social mobility upon

completion of the terms of the contract.

Briefly put, in theory a person agreed to serve a master for

a period of years in exchange for transportation to a colony. The

employer actually bought the servant or rights to the servant (an

enduring point of scholarly debate), and paid for his or her

maintenance. At the end of the term of servitude, the master

provided what was called freedom dues, which may have been land,

a commodity such as tobacco or sugar, cash, or some other medium

of exchange. Artisans and craftsmen often received more favorable

terms than common laborers, but not always better treatment.

Abuses of the system were commonplace at every level of English

society, at home and abroad.

In English colonial records of the early seventeenth

century, the social class of servants was divided into Christian

(i.e. white), Indian, or Negro. The common use of the official

legal term slave in the colonies, as well as its racial

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association with Africans, was to appear only in later Stuart

years after the establishment of the Royal African Company;

however, use of the term slave was common in literature, drama,

and unofficial sources. Most early accounts of white indentured

servants indicate that they saw themselves as slaves and were

likened to slaves by observers. There are numerous accounts of

gangs of white and black field hands working side by side in cane

fields and boiling houses. Mortality was high among all groups.

Yet, technically, and legally, the white servants were not

slaves, or so the plantocracy and authorities of the state said.

No laborers, indentured or enslaved, had a say in what they were

going to do, regardless of contracts, and all were worked

ruthlessly. Eric Williams, the noted scholar and first Prime

Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, puts the case succinctly:

Slavery in the Caribbean has been too narrowly identified with

the Negro. A racial twist has thereby been given to what is basically

an economic phenomenon…Unfree labor in the New World was

brown, white, black, and yellow; Catholic, Protestant, and pagan.6

6 Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of NorthCarolina Press, 1944): 7.

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The key term is “unfree.” Williams, writing in 1944, addressed

the claims of Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders, written in 1683: “Defoe

bluntly stated that the white servant was a slave. He was not.”7

Williams’ comparison of the two conditions is based on historical

legal codes that were first enacted forty years into the British

colonial era. Williams concedes, however, that “White servitude

was the historic base upon which Negro slavery was built.”8 There

are many important facts, often contradictory, to be discussed

comparing servitude and slavery in the following paragraphs.

For most modern scholars, the single consistent difference

between a servant and a slave was the hereditary, perpetual

character of chattel slavery. However, as will be seen, there are

many variations on this theme. Still other modern scholars have

argued that slavery “is not defined by time but by the experience

of its subject.”9 The inescapable truth is that tens of thousands

of servants died before their terms expired; those men, women,

and children served life sentences. This disparity in terms may

be attributed to the revisionist imposition of later, well-known 7 Ibid., 18.8 Ibid., 19.9 Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White

Slaves in America (NY: NYU Press, 2008):15.

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general conditions of southern U.S. slavery on an earlier period

in the Caribbean for which there is much less information. A

disturbing possible alternative exists: in order to placate or

entice white servants, members of the plantocracy and state

authorities maintained a deceptive myth that whites were not

slaves; the myth formed official state policy that has been

perpetuated by masters, slaves, and their descendants ever since.

There is still a third possibility: servants and slaves occupied

the same social class, but were differentiated by well-

established cultural norms and practices. It is even possible

that the truth lies in some combination of the three. The only

way to be certain is to understand the concept of slavery in the

seventeenth-century English mind.

Neither slavery nor servitude had precisely the same

meanings or connotations in 1600 that they have had in any

successive century. The conditions of slavery have historically

varied from age to age, from culture to culture, and even from

colony to colony, not to mention from owner to owner. Europeans

did not create slavery or racism, but merely formed their own

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cultural adaptations of them, which evolved over time.10 By some

accounts, the word slave originally entered European usage to

denote a servant of foreign origin.11 Issues of race, class, and

African slavery were well known in England at least as early as

the reign of Henry VIII.12 During the late Tudor and early Stuart

period, William Shakespeare portrays many aspects of well-

developed racial awareness; in Othello, he depicts the conflict of

extreme racial prejudice and tolerance in society across class

boundaries.

The English feudal system of labor, including serfs and

villeins, survived by degrees into the late Tudor and early

Stuart period. Villeinage formed the basis of colonial servitude

10 A classic example is the nineteenth-century biological concept of race. In the seventeenth century, race was primarily a feature of regional culture or familial lineage.

11 In feudal Germany, France, and England, servi denoted native serfs and servants; sclavi denoted foreign slaves. The words could be “applied to variousclasses of serfs and villeins.” Servi and their masters tended to be “of a common race and shared a culture,” whereas sclavi were usually given “a far lower status.” David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca, NY:Cornell University Press, 1966): 52.

12 According to one scholar of racial history, “…slavery was accepted asa necessary social institution by most European thinkers. Two men as differentas Sir Thomas More and Martin Luther argued the need for slavery. More included slavery in his Utopia and Luther used the Bible to justify slavery andthe sale of slaves.” Louis Ruchames, “The Sources of Racial Thought in Colonial America,” The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Oct., 1967): 254. The same distinction between native and foreign is cited by numerous scholars of English labor, notably Vinogradoff and Savine.

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codes, and by extension of the later slave codes.13 A villein,

according to a 1590 definition in the Oxford English Dictionary Online,

included “…such as lacke freedome, & full liberty, as bond-slave,

slaves, and villeines.” Writing in the early 1600s, Shakespeare’s

clear association of slavery with villeinage is expressed in The

Tempest, Act I, Scene II:

Prospero: We’ll visit Caliban, my slave, who never yields us kind answer.

Miranda: ‘Tis a villain, sir, I do not love to look on.Prospero: We cannot miss him: he does make our fire,

Fetch in our wood; and serves in offices That profit us…(Emphasis added.)

Miranda’s use of “villain” is not a reference to criminality, but

class. Villeinage, bondage, and slavery were still associated

with servitude in the English public mind throughout the

seventeenth century: in an attempt to bolster emigration by white

indentured servants, English government authorities in 1676

13 The definitive text on villeinage is still Paul Vinogradoff, Villainage in England: Essays in English Medieval History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892). Vinogradoff provided exhaustive details of every scrap of law and literature on serfdom, slavery, villeinage, and servitude, from Roman times through the seventeenth century. A comparison of West Indian servants’ and slaves’ codes can be seen to have been taken directly from preexisting English law with onlyminor modifications. As early as the mid fifteenth century, villeins were separated into two classes: those who were transferable, whose chattels and bodies were owned by their masters, and those who were attached to the land and estate. Villains, servants, bondservants, and slaves were terms that were used interchangeably to refer to the servant class in general from the fifteenth century on. (pp. 44-49)

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considered changing indentured servitude to service. Indentures had

decreased dramatically, as word had reached England regarding the

treatment of servants as slaves in the colonies.14

There are three definitions of slavery that are relevant to

this thesis: the modern definition of the reader/writer; the

nineteenth-century definition of Macaulay, chosen because his

description of enslaved white plantation laborers planted the

seed for this thesis; and the early to mid-seventeenth century

definition of…whom? Parliament? Merchants? Planters? Servants?

Enlightenment philosphes like John Locke, Burke, or Voltaire, or

poets like John Milton? The contradictions and confusion of

authorities on this issue are no less perplexing today than they

have been for the past four centuries.

As for the modern definition, a 2006 article in The Economist

reported that in 2007 there would be “more slaves in the world

than ever before,” somewhere between 12.3 and 27 million

worldwide. Although modern slavery has taken many forms, slaves

“don’t choose their condition and can’t get out of it.” The

article cites the 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of 14 Lords of Trade and Plantations, Calendar of State Papers (Colonial) IX, 394

(May 30, 1676). Cited in Williams, 17.

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Human Rights, Article 4: “No one shall be held in slavery or

servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all

their forms.” Finally, the author explains, “The most common form of

slavery is bonded labour, in which labour is taken as repayment for a

loan…the bond can be passed down from one generation to the next.

Bonded labour may sound as though it has a voluntary aspect,

which disqualifies it as slavery. But most bonded labourers have

no choice and their lot is in effect that of chattel slaves.”15 (Emphasis added.)

On a web portal titled Pan-African Roots: The Revolutionary Voice of 1.3 Billion

African People Worldwide!, slavery is defined as “a political-economic

and social system under which people - individuals and/or groups

– are owned, held and/or leased as chattel property and/or are

forced to work for the benefit and enrichment of others.”16 For

the purpose of this thesis, the modern definition of “slave” is

taken from the Oxford English Dictionary Online: “One who is the

property of, and entirely subject to, another person, whether by

capture, purchase, or birth; a servant completely divested of

freedom and personal rights.” None of these definitions stipulate

15 Steve King, “Of inhuman bondage: Another bumper year for the slave trade,” The Economist Online (Nov. 16, 2006). <http://www.economist.com/node/8134556/print.html> (Accessed May 11, 2011).

16 http://paroots.org/?page_id=151 (Accessed Oct. 3, 2011).

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requirements of term length or hereditary state. It is remarkable

that modern definitions and examples of slavery, servitude, and

bonded labor almost perfectly characterize the indentured English

white servant, voluntary or otherwise, of the early to mid-

seventeenth century on Caribbean British plantations. In view of

this information, one is forced to ask whether some indentured

servants may in fact have been slaves in actual practice.

For many modern and post-modern scholars, any discussion of

slavery and the plantation complex is unavoidably linked to the

issue of race and racism, specifically of the black and white

variety. Current trends in academia relating to race can be as

perplexing as the issue of slavery itself, often employing modern

concepts such as ethnocentrism, indigenousness, nationalism,

biological phenotypes, and socioeconomic stratification. For the

purpose of this thesis, the traditionally accepted notion that

racism is or was a European invention is treated as an example of

a false historical consciousness. Ibn Khaldun, a Tunisian-born

diplomat, civil servant, Islamic judge, and teacher from Morocco

to Baghdad, wrote in his 1377 history that the “Negro nations

are, as a rule, submissive to slavery [because they] have little

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that is essentially human and possess attributes that are quite

similar to those of dumb animals…”17 The persistence of non-

European enslavement of black Africans well into the late

twentieth century is well known.18 It pre-dates and supersedes

Atlantic colonial plantation slavery as a continuous practice.

In the context of early West Indies plantation labor, the

limited construct of race as a color issue obscures the

surprising complexities of the social and economic issues of

colonial servitude by any name, in any nation. For Eric Williams

in 1944,

The features of the man, his hair, color and dentifrice, his ‘subhuman’

characteristics so widely pleaded were only the later rationalizations to

justify a simple economic fact…. not a theory, it was apractical conclusion

deduced from the personal experience of the planter.19

Further, Williams added,

17 Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History. Translated by Franz Rosenthal, abridged and edited by N. J. Dawood. Princeton, NJ: Bollingen Series, Princeton University Press (1989): 117.

18 For enslavement during the Sudan conflict, see Adeoye Akinsanya, “TheAfro-Arab Alliance: Dream or Reality,” African Affairs, Vol. 75, No. 301 (Oct., 1976): 515. For enslavement in Islamic Mauritania see Rhoda E. Howard, “Civil Conflict in Sub-Saharan Africa: Internally Generated Causes,” International Journal, Vol. 51, No. 1, Africa’s Prospects (Winter, 1995/1996): 37.

19 Williams, 20.

17

Since they [white indentured servants] were bound for alimited period,

the planter had less interest in their welfare than in that of the Negroes

who were perpetual servants… The servants were regardedby the planters

as ‘white trash,’ and were bracketed with the Negroes as laborers.20

As will be shown below, white servitude as a form of slavery was

coterminous with black slavery from the beginning of the English

colonial period, overlapping and sometimes intermingled in a

broad social class of forced labor. Race was not a later feature,

but one that existed from the outset, and which only later became

a separate class. In economic terms, color was not the issue.

Writing a century earlier than Williams, Macaulay in his

History of England did not equate race or slavery with color either,

as evident in his description of the Irish, who “were the

hereditary serfs of his [the Englishman’s] race…” and who, “…as

soon as Oliver [Cromwell] came among them…had sunk…into that

slavery which was their fit portion.”21 There is little doubt

that the prominent liberal Whig politician and historian of

nineteenth-century England equated serfdom with slavery, and that20 Ibid., 17.21 Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England. Edited and abridged by

Hugh Trevor-Roper (NY: Penguin Books, 1968): 244-45.

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the white Irish were deemed a separate, inferior race to be

subjugated by English masters, “…for it is thus that a dominant

race always explains its ascendency and excuses its tyranny.”22

Macaulay’s perspective on race-based class distinction was

alive and well at the beginning of the twentieth century when

English Prime Minister A. J. Balfour extended the race/class

distinction to include Englishmen:

…I ask where the character of the hereditary serf is more clearly

to be discerned than in the rural labourer of to-day…Race became

class, but if the agricultural labourer is not descended from the villein

with almost unbroken identity of comparative condition,what is he

descended from?23

Balfour and earlier – and sadly, later - Social Darwinists viewed

socioeconomic issues of race and class as scientific fact. Three

hundred years after the reign of Elizabeth Tudor, Balfour and

many of his contemporaries theorized that English peasants must

have been racially descended from ancient Saxon thralls, Roman

servi or imported sclavi, or some other vanquished and subjugated

22 Ibid., 244.23 Balfour was Prime Minister of England from 1902-1905. His speech is

quoted in Frederick W. Hackwood, The Good Old Times: The Romance of Humble Life in England (U.S. Edition, New York: Brentano’s, 1911): 382.

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social remnant. An Englishman’s liberty only applied, it seems,

to some Englishmen; this was true in Macaulay’s time, just as it

was true in Tudor and Stuart times, even if it was rarely exposed

with Balfour’s candor. Color was never the only feature of race.

Slavery and serfdom in some form existed during the reigns

of Edward VI and Elizabeth, officially or otherwise. An act of

1547, though repealed after two years, prescribed enslavement as

a punishment;24 while in 1558, the household orders of the Earl

of Derby clearly delineated treatment of “slaves” who were “white

men, natives, and bond-servants.”25 According to Hackwood, “the

last claim of villenage [sic] recorded in our [English] courts

was in the fifteenth year of James I,” or in 1618, only one year

before the first black slaves landed in Virginia. Further,

“villenage was never abolished by statute…de facto villenage by

24 The text is quoted in Hackwood, 128-29.25 Ibid., 356-57. See also Alexander Savine, “Bondmen under the Tudors,”

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, New Series, Vol. 17, 235-289 (1903): “In theTudor period I have found bondmen in twenty-six English counties and at least in eighty manors, but probably they existed in many more…It is obvious enough that all, or almost all, families which remained bond under Elizabeth and James were bond under Henry VII and Henry VIII.’ (p. 247). Regarding the use of the term “slave” in Derby’s household, Savine wonders, “May we suppose thatLord Derby had coloured people in his household?” (p. 250). Others have also assumed that Derby’s slave was a reference to black servants, while some believe the term was applied equally to any unfree member of the bond-servant class of villeins and the like.

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birth ceased some time in the days of the Stuarts…”26 This was at

least true in theory, if not in practice.

We can be certain that the conventions were still in use in

the colonies when we read the statutes of Massachusetts in 1641

or of Rhode Island in 1652. Massachusetts banned “any Bond-

slavery, Villenage or Captivity” except in certain circumstances;

while Rhode Island saw fit to limit “a common course practiced

amongst English men” by ordering that “no blacke mankind or white

being forced by covenant bond or otherwise” could serve a master

longer than ten years.27 Bondage in Massachusetts was still

allowed for prisoners of war; voluntary indentures, or those who

were sold to them with existing bonds; and as a punitive measure

by proper authority. The maximum term length of ten years put

black slaves in Rhode Island on more equal footing with English

servants. By one account, villeinage “persisted in Scotland well

into the eighteenth century.”28

26 Hackwood, 51.27 Cited in Winthrop D. Jordan, “The Influence of the West Indies on the

Origins of New England Slavery,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Apr., 1961): 244-45.

28 Oscar and Mary F. Handlin, “Origins of the Southern Labor System,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 7, No. 2 (Apr., 1950): 200.

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African slavery and servitude probably existed in England

since at least 1501, when Catherine of Aragon arrived in England

to marry Prince Arthur with “African attendants.”29 Thus, from

the early sixteenth century, both slavery and servitude, black

and white, were well-established features of the English system

of labor and social class-consciousness throughout the early

colonial period at home and abroad.30 Racial distinction existed

from the outset; separation of the two races into distinct

classes evolved throughout the seventeenth century as an economic

expedient to encourage emigration of white labor. There is

general agreement among scholars that black slavery “was a

clearly defined status” only in the “latter half of the

29 David Dabydeen, John Gilmore, and Cecily Jones, eds., Chronology Appendix, Oxford Companion to Black British History (New York: Oxford University Press,2010): 537.

30 There is an extensive corpus of work detailing the sociocultural history of blacks in England. See Imtiaz Habib, Shakespeare and Race: Postcolonial Praxis in the Early Modern Period (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2000); James Schultz, “Shakespeare’s Colors: Race and Culture in Elizabethan England,” Quest, Vol. 5, Issue 1 (Jan., 2002): http://www.odu.edu/ao/instadv/quest/Shakespeare.html (Accessed Feb. 22nd, 2011); David Dabydeen, ed., The Black Presence in English Literature (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1985); Hendricks, Margo. “Race: A Renaissance Category?” in Hattaway, Michael, ed. A Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture, 690-698 (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd. 2000); and Eldred Jones, Othello’s Countrymen: The African in English Renaissance Drama (London: Oxford University Press, 1965): Jones provides a superb chronology of the cultural adaptation of blacks in English society fromthe beginning of the sixteenth century.

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eighteenth century;”31 Oscar and Mary Handlin have stated that

“The status of Negroes was that of servants’ and so they were

identified and treated down to the 1660’s [sic].”32 It seems

reasonable to assume that English bond-servitude was a single

class differentiated by terms to denote native or foreign origin.

Seventeenth-century writers deserve to be taken at their

word. It is for modern readers not to rename, but to try to

interpret and understand their usage and meaning. The term slave

was, as the Handlins assert, in some cases a “term of derogation…

to express contempt” with “no meaning in law,”33 but in other

cases was an actual social state that embraced various classes

based on established labor and legal conventions. In seventeenth-

century England and its colonies, slavery was a perceived reality

in the consciousness, vocabulary, and experience of both

servants, whether white or black, and masters, both white and

black; it represented the practice of coercive labor and the loss

of personal liberty, both literally and figuratively.

31 Handlins, 199.32 Ibid., 202. 33 Ibid., 204.

23

It seems highly likely that Africans and Amerindians were

not the only slaves on West Indies plantations. This conclusion

is supported by a handful of seventeenth-century sources, the

fragments and echoes of Walcott’s illegitimate, broken mongrels,

to whom, in the words of an early twentieth-century scholar, “no

historian ever has paid, or ever will pay, the slightest

attention.”34 No historian, that is, before Macaulay in the

nineteenth century.

34 J.G. Muddiman, ed., Preface to The Bloody Assizes. London: William Hodge and Co. (1929).

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2. Macaulay and Whig Martyrs

“The doctrines of Christianity have in every age been largelyaccommodated to the philosophy which happened to be

prevalent…not propitious to the formation of steady moralconvictions, but convenient enough…for defending

the doctrine of the moment.” –J. S. Mill35

“The truth is, that bigotry will never want a pretence.”- Lord Macaulay36

Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800-1859) was a distinguished

liberal Whig civil servant, scholar, Member of Parliament, and

prolific author of poetry, essays, and history. Having served in

India, he was intimately familiar with the moral, social,

economic, and political fabric of empire. For Macaulay, the

prevalent philosophy and “doctrine of the moment” was the liberal

Whig political agenda, which he tirelessly and unapologetically

advanced. Macaulay’s political philosophy and version of history

was, like the Victorian England in which he lived, based on

assumptions of national and racial superiority by which colonial

policy was justified.

35 John Stuart Mill, “Three Essays on Religion: Nature.” In Prose of the Victorian Period, edited by William E. Buckler (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1958): 316.

36 Macaulay, “Jewish Disabilities,” in Speeches, 85-94: 92.

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From its seventeenth-century beginnings in North America and

the West Indies, English imperial expansion had grown by the

nineteenth century to include Africa, India, and China; in each

area, English dominance was based on inequality and coercion for

the subjugation of inferior races to achieve economic and

military hegemony. That lesson, learned and perfected in the West

Indies, posed a thorny problem for Macaulay and most, if not all

of his contemporaries: what one modern historian has called “the

fundamental contradiction of the Victorian empire…it was

impossible to reconcile the imperial mission abroad with the

liberal tradition at home.”37 The lofty religious and idealistic

social reforms for which he labored in England were in stark

contrast to the exploitation and repression of imperial subjects.

Macaulay was a living contradiction who, like Mill, strove to

accommodate his convictions of Whig liberalism to the prevalent

economic demands of empire.

The Whig movement, born during the religious and political

strife of the seventeenth century, was itself torn by sectarian

rancor in its infancy. The original founders of what would come 37 David Gilmour, “The Ends of Empire.” The Wilson Quarterly (Spring, 1997):

37.

26

to be known as Whiggism sought inclusion and tolerance for

Dissenters, Levellers, and other Protestant non-conformists;

espoused republican parliamentary government over the absolute

monarchy of the Tudors and Stuarts and oligarchic Church of

England; and embraced free trade principles. The future Whigs’

first brush with power had gone disastrously wrong in the

military tyranny of Oliver Cromwell; after consolidating power,

Cromwell persecuted many of his former supporters. Following the

Restoration of the Stuarts, a fresh round of political reprisals

began. In Macaulay’s words, “… the training of the High Church

ended in the reign of the Puritans… the training of the Puritans

ended in the reign of the harlots.”38 Of the early Whig movement,

two critical points must be made: first, it represented the first

general shift toward secular government by popular consent; and

second, a fixed Whig ideology began to take shape only in the

last decade of the seventeenth century. Macaulay discussed Whig

ideology as if it had existed from time immemorial; this was a

complete fabrication, as mythical as the ancient constitution

espoused by seventeenth-century radicals.38 Macaulay, “Southey’s Colloquies,” in Prose of the Victorian Period, edited by

William E. Buckler, 3-36 (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1958): 25.

27

The seventeenth century was one of the most violent periods

in English history. Civil wars, famines, plagues, foreign wars

with Spain, the Netherlands, France, and Ottoman vassals in the

Mediterranean, economic crises at home and abroad, rampant

unemployment and crushing poverty, and religious persecution had

all contributed to an empty Exchequer and a dysfunctional state

on the verge of collapse with frenzied power grabs.39 The

constant atmosphere of violent social and political upheaval led

to the last execution of a reigning English monarch, Charles I,

in 1649. In the decade leading up to the Duke of Monmouth’s

Rebellion in 1685, the country was a virtual powder keg of

political intrigue and violence, still reeling from the

oppressive rule of Cromwell,40 but unwilling to accept the

39 See also Frank W. Grinnell, “Modern Estimates of Two ‘Infamous’ Judges and the Lesson of the Reputations of Jeffreys and Braxfield,” Journal of Law and Criminology (1931-1951), Vol. 31, No. 4, 410-416 (Nov. – Dec., 1940): 414-415. The State Trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fill “three volumes…and more than two thousand pages of crowded print. They contain twenty-two trials for treason, three for murder or attempt to murder… Besides conflict with foreign powers, war and rebellion, constant in Scotland and almost chronic in Ireland, may be counted, in eight reigns, three completed revolutions, ten armed rebellions, two great civil wars, and plots innumerable, all emanating from within the English nation alone…the English government was a fighting machine…”

40 Although estimates vary widely, at least 100,000 English were killed during the Civil Wars “in a population of some five millions” while “The Scotswere bled white” and Ireland lost “over 40% of its population.” See H. N. Brailsford, The Levellers and the English Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1961): 1. Brailsford clearly identifies the fate of political

28

stability offered by Charles II and James II, both of whom were

demonized in propaganda tracts as conspiratorial enemies of

English liberty. One prominent Whig activist, Robert Ferguson,

“accused James II of trying to impose ‘thralldom and bondage’ on

English subjects.”41 It is worth noting that the perceived threat

of thralldom, or Saxon slavery, and bondage was powerful enough

to foment national rebellion in the collective consciousness,

yet, as will be shown below, many of the worst abusers of bond-

servitude at the time were members of the political group that

would become known as Whigs.

Following the Dutch invasion of England by William of Orange

and his wife Mary Stuart in 1688, Whigs “rewrote the history of

their movement, mythologizing, sanctifying, and sanitizing their

exploits, nursing tales of the ‘bloody assizes’ and the ‘glorious

revolution’ that became part of the English historiographical

tradition” which came to be known as Whig liberalism.42 Many of

the rhetorical flourishes and platitudes of that period would be

transports as slaves “in all but name” (p. 334). Brailsford’s numbers are conservative; many are higher, especially for Ireland and Scotland; accurate numbers for Wales are elusive in all sources consulted for this thesis.

41 Melinda S. Zook, Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in Late Stuart England (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999): 99.

42 Ibid., xxi.

29

familiar to modern U.S. audiences, including ubiquitous

references to “the people.” Writing in 1694, prominent Whig

advocate James Tyrrell defined what he meant by “the people:” “I

desire always to be understood that when I make use of the word

people, I do not mean the vulgar or mixed multitude, but in the

state of nature the whole body of freemen and women…”43 The

reference to “free” men and women is a clear avowal of the

existence of unfree people, to use Eric Williams’ 1944 term (see

above), while the reference to the “vulgar or mixed multitude”

represents the rigid class stratification of English society.

Macaulay was the heir of this tradition, propagating an

ideology to rationalize the accession to power of a new

sociopolitical elite. There was no pretense of equality - social,

racial or otherwise – in a political struggle for the control of

access to England’s vast newfound economic resources accruing

from foreign trade and colonial expansion. New commercial

opportunities offered by mercantile capitalism afforded upward

social mobility and material wealth to a previously obscure class

of free merchants, artisans, and tradesmen who did not fit in to

43 Quoted in ibid., 180.

30

the traditional dichotomous social order of the haves and have-

nots, free and unfree, masters and servants. The emergent middle

class arguably formed the core of the nascent liberal movement;

they sought broader freedoms that could only be obtained by

access to mainstream political power. Macaulay certainly

understood this, as he stated in a speech to the House of Commons

in 1833: “Property is power…By such steps we pass from official

power to landed property, and from landed property to personal

property, and from property to liberty.”44 It may be deduced from

this statement that liberty was for the powerful, or for those

with access to power. This was certainly true in the seventeenth

century. Race, class, color and religion were important

qualifiers for access to power. Liberals and Whigs challenged the

established order.

One of the groups that had historically been denied access

to power in England was the Jewish community. In the above

speech, in which he was advocating for the relaxation of

restrictions on Jews in England, Macaulay provided valuable

44 Macaulay, “Jewish Disabilities,” in Speeches: 87.

31

perspective on the treatment of the powerless, whom he classed as

slaves:

We treat them [Jews] as slaves, and wonder that they donot

regard us as brethren. We drive them to mean occupations, and

then reproach them for not embracing honourable professions.

We long forbade them to possess land… We shut them out from

all the paths of ambition… But were they always a mere money-

changing, money-getting, money-hoarding race?45

In another speech delivered in the House of Commons later the

same year, Macaulay refers to British rule of India in terms that

show how little things had changed over the previous two

centuries:

That a handful of adventurers from an island in the Atlantic should

have subjugated a vast country divided from the place of their birth

by half the globe…a territory inhabited by men differing in race, colour,

language, manners, morals, religion…Reason is confounded. We

interrogate the past in vain. General rules are uselesswhere the

whole is one vast exception.46

45 Ibid., 93.46 Macaulay, “Government of India,” in Speeches: 106.

32

Macaulay distinguished between race and color, religion and

culture. In the nineteenth century, Whigs were still redefining

the rules for access to power, or rather rationalizing Whig

power. Macaulay struggled with formulating a new society that in

effect was still constrained by values that had changed little in

over two hundred years.

It is interesting to consider that the Jews he was talking

about lived in England, and clearly constituted a distinct social

class based on English religious and racial discrimination. Given

that class was a political and economic category, the question

arises: did different religious belief alone constitute

membership in a different race? By contrast, the Indians were

foreign, and were entitled only to be ruled by England. How were

Whigs to tolerate different religions in England, but not abroad?

Was it because English Jews were native, while Indians were

foreign? Additional examples are as instructive as they are

contradictory and confusing. Macaulay freely admitted, “Our

regulations in civil matters do not define rights, but merely

establish remedies.”47 In other words, the English were using

47 Ibid., 121.

33

what today in the U.S. would be called a Band-Aid approach,

making it up as they went along. Only one term in the racial

vernacular was clear: subjugation.

While it may be unfair or unwise to apply the template of

nineteenth-century empire to English behavior and attitudes in

different countries and different times, Macaulay’s shrewd and

sometimes startlingly honest assessments of the Empire in India

are corroborated by West Indian narratives two centuries earlier;

they sound remarkably like half-hearted apologies for a situation

that was as unavoidable as human nature itself. English

colonists, for example,

…too often abused the strength which they derived from superior

energy and superior knowledge. It is true that, with some of the

highest qualities of the race from which they sprang, combined some

of the worst defects of the race over which they ruled…Born in

humble station, accustomed to earn a slender maintenance by obscure

industry…they were what it was natural that men should be who had

been raised by so rapid an ascent…profuse and rapacious, imperious

and corrupt.48

48 Ibid., 110-111.

34

The idea of racially superior yet naïve masters being corrupted

by racially inferior subjects is a key concept that is further

enhanced by his criticism of members of a lower class achieving

upward social mobility, although lacking the refinement and

integrity of the higher class. This was a frequent criticism of

seventeenth-century nouveaux riches planters, who were elevated to a

higher social class by acquiring wealth.49 The relationship

between class and race was problematic, especially in the

presence of foreigners, who were deemed naturally inferior by

virtue of race. Following this line of thought, it is useful to

consider Balfour’s discussion of English agricultural laborers as

descendants of a separate race (above), and to wonder if they

might have been included in Balfour’s native race in the presence

of foreign, i.e. racially or ethnically distinct, social elements

in the English countryside at the time. If so, this distinction 49 The creation of new cultures, or sub-cultures, among English

colonists essentially rendered them foreign in the opinions of some English observers, adding a new challenge to the established order. One leading scholar of Barbadian history says “Travellers to the island in the eighteenth century noted these changes, especially on the white population, who were accused of ‘lisping the language of the Negroes,’ or of ‘adopting the Negro style.’”Karl Watson, Slavery and Economy in Barbados (Nov., 2005). As is well known, the native/creole social distinction was also common in French and Spanish societies. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/barbados_01.shtml (Accessed Aug. 18, 2011).

35

could lie at the heart of the servant/slave dichotomy, and would

confirm the endurance of the Roman servi/sclavi distinction: slaves

were either native or foreign, and were simply identified by

different names. Race may thus be seen as a descriptor of

cultural context.

Distinct culture was also not the only feature of race.

Macaulay adds, “I am proud of my country and my age. Here are a

hundred millions of people under the absolute rule of a few

strangers, differing from them physically, differing from them

morally, mere Mamelukes, not born in the country which they rule,

not meaning to lay their bones in it.”50 The first issue that

leaps off the page is of course Macaulay’s pride in English

absolute rule over others, since absolutism was ostensibly the

single most important cause uniting Whig protests against the

Stuarts. The moral and physical attributes are obviously features

of race. The implicit comparison of Mamelukes to imperial

authority can easily be likened to absentee plantation owners as

another enduring feature of empire: West Indian planters and

other fortune seekers were very clear about their intentions to

50 Macaulay, “Government of India,” in Speeches, 113.

36

remain overseas only as long as it took to amass a fortune so

they could retire to a life of luxury and ease back in England.51

In a widely publicized and controversial speech delivered to

the House of Commons in 1844, Macaulay directly addressed issues

at the heart of this thesis. Discussing “The State of Ireland,”

he called conquest of that island “the conquest of a race by a

race.” Macaulay cites the enmity between Irish and English as

that “felt by populations which are locally intermingled, but

which have never morally and politically amalgamated…”52 He then

provides another key insight into his perspective:

Our island has suffered cruelly from the same evil.Here the Saxon had trampled on the Celt, the Dane on the Saxon, the Norman on Celt, Saxon, and Dane. Yet in the course of ages all the four races had been fused together to form the great English people. A

similarfusion would probably have taken place in Ireland, but for the Reformation…

51 In a letter from Henry Winthrop to his father, John Winthrop, from October 15, 1627: “…I am here on this Iland of the Weest Indyes colled the Barbathes, settled for a plantation for to-backow, one wch Iland here is but 3score christyanes and fortye slaves of negeres and Indyenes, and here I doe purpoes, and if it please God, to stay 3 yeres…” Cited in N. Darnell Davis, The Cavaliers and Roundheads of Barbados, 1650-1652, with some account of the early history of Barbados (Georgetown, British Guiana: Argosy Press, 1887): 33. Also Christopher Jeaffreson’s letter of May 6, 1681: “When I left England, I did not resolve upon any stay, nor did I ever propose to myselfe a longer tyme than four yeares, which I thought a long tyme to be in the West Indies.” In John Cordy Jeaffreson: 262.

52 Macaulay, “The State of Ireland,” in Speeches, 217.

37

Here we find that race is also a function of moral and political

amalgamation; however, this was mitigated by religion, as

“through the whole of the seventeenth century, the freedom of

Ireland and the slavery of England meant the same thing.”53 As

has already been shown, in addition to morality, politics, and

religion, race could also be a function of class, geography,

culture, or color: in short, a variable, highly subjective term

with no clear definition or, in Macaulay’s words, “one vast

exception.” Race was, evidently, a political tool of expedience

that could be molded to accommodate the prevailing needs of the

group in power at the time. By the nineteenth century, the only

fixed qualities of race appear to have been color and

nationality; all other qualities were subject to interpretation.

In whatever form it assumed, racial thought formed the rationale

for subjugation, which in its extreme form was enslavement; this

was the same process observed in the southern U.S. plantation

society. It was clearly a nineteenth-century motif.

Nowhere is the exception more evident than in Macaulay’s

accounts of the Irish extirpation policy of Cromwell, which

53 Ibid., 218.

38

Macaulay called “wise, and strong, and straightforward, and

cruel.” Cromwell’s purpose was “to make Ireland thoroughly Anglo-

Saxon and Protestant.” By comparison, the policy of William III,

a personal hero of Macaulay’s, was “perhaps not more humane in

reality… they were doomed to be what the Helots were in Sparta,

what the Greeks were under the Ottoman, what the blacks now are

at New York. Every man of the subject caste was strictly excluded

from public trust.”54 Here Macaulay has conflated the “English

people,” of whom Saxons were but a component earlier in the same

speech, with the mythical Whig “Anglo-Saxon,” a contradiction

that he does not elucidate further. His categorization of the

depopulation of Ireland as “wise” is unapologetic, and he makes

no mention of the enslavement of the Irish on Caribbean

plantations. The Irish under Cromwell were clearly not viewed as

martyrs. By contrast, Macaulay is quite clear about the fate of

the Irish under William III, likening them to slaves, but without

using the actual term, as if it were taboo. Perhaps it was, since

associating one of his favorite historical figures with slavery

in light of the recent emancipation at the time of this speech

54 Ibid., 219.

39

would have sullied the memory of Whigs. He does, however, make an

apology for William III, one which is repeated in his History of

England, although couched in different terms: he claims that the

enslavement of the Irish was not actually William’s policy, but

was rather the policy “of those whose inclinations William was

under the necessity of consulting.”55

William III’s supporters were, of course, for the most part

Whigs, whose victims did not merit martyrdom. This strong bias

has earned Macaulay considerable notoriety as a political

activist and propagandist, and has called into question the

reliability of his History of England, in his own time and in the

current era. One prominent political contemporary observed of

Macaulay that “each subject that he treated of… [was] a mirror

which reflected the image of himself.” Gladstone warns us, in his

introduction to a collection of Macaulay’s Speeches, that Macaulay

is strongly biased, with “a more than ordinary defect in the

mental faculty of appreciating opponents…often misled by fancy or

prejudice…occasionally seduced into the indulgence of a measure

of vindictive feeling” and “a constant tendency to exaggerate,

55 Ibid.

40

with unjust and hasty judgments.”56 His personal defects

notwithstanding, a distinguished English historian wrote in 1968

that “The interpretation of English history which he [Macaulay]

gave became the standard interpretation for nearly a century: so

universally accepted that we hardly realize the novelty which it

once contained…The severest critics themselves are generally

unaware of the extent to which they depend on the achievement of

their victim.”57 Regardless of Macaulay’s personal agenda,

without his narratives the subject of white slavery might never

have been linked to indentured servitude. Macaulay is clear on

this subject, at least in part.

In his description in The History of England of the Bloody

Assizes of 1685, Macaulay espoused what is currently widely

referred to as Whig martyrology, a mythologized political

perspective of historical events following the rout of the Duke

of Monmouth’s troops at Sedgemoor by royalist forces of the

56 William Ewart Gladstone, “Introduction”, in Speeches: ix-xi. Gladstone, a distinguished career politician and senior statesman who served in Parliament with Macaulay, provided what is perhaps the least biased and most objective account of Macaulay’s writings and speeches. Gladstone was initially a Tory, but became a founding member of the Liberal Party the same year that Macaulay died. He was an avid proponent of social reform.

57 Hugh Trevor-Roper, “Lord Macaulay: Introduction,” in The History of England: 7.

41

Catholic Stuart monarch, James II. The Assizes, or trials, of the

Whig rebels were conducted by the much-maligned Lord High

Chancellor, Judge Jeffreys. In addition to the usual punishments

for treason, such as execution and imprisonment, over eight

hundred of Monmouth’s supporters were reportedly transported to

West Indies plantations; the term transported has traditionally

been associated with seventeenth-century penal or bond servitude,

or later banishment to penal colonies in places like Australia.

Macaulay says without hesitation that they were slaves.

Transportation of prisoners to plantations as bond servants

or slaves was nothing new in the time of James II. It was the

means by which Cromwell had nearly depopulated Ireland. It was

used by Macaulay’s hero, William III, and by all of his

Hanoverian successors in the eighteenth century and well into the

nineteenth. Macaulay knew this. Macaulay also understood the

differences between voluntary indentured servitude and black

slavery. Macaulay portrayed the transportation of Monmouth’s

rebels as a unique Stuart perversion of justice in order to

vilify the enemies of Whigs, i.e. Catholics, Stuarts, and their

Tory supporters. This would have served not only to strengthen

42

the history of seventeenth-century Whigs, but would also have

bolstered public support of Whig policies in the nineteenth

century; Whig-Tory conflict was a virtual battlefield when his

History of England was written. Macaulay’s descriptions of the trials

per se are not entirely inaccurate or distorted, but they are

heavily embellished with Whig rhetoric and provide decidedly

unfair portraits of the main players in the events. Macaulay was

never one to mince words, as was seen above in his speech in

which he referred to the Restoration Stuarts as harlots. As will

be shown below, it was during the Restoration that the white

slave trade was severely diminished, and illegal traders, many of

whom were prominent Whigs, were prosecuted. This might have been

viewed by Macaulay as an attack on free trade, were it not for

the fact that the trade involved the wholesale kidnapping of

thousands of innocent men, women, and children and selling them

into slavery. It was much safer for Macaulay to simply attack the

Stuarts.

Macaulay provides a gripping narrative that fairly

accurately describes the initial fate of Monmouth’s rebels, who

were

43

more wretched than their associates who suffered death,were

distributed into gangs, and bestowed on persons whoenjoyed favour

at court. The conditions of the gift were that theconvicts should be

carried beyond sea as slaves, that they should not beemancipated for

ten years, and that the place of their banishmentshould be some

West Indian island. This last article was studiouslyframed for the

purpose of aggravating the misery of the exiles. In NewEngland or

New Jersey they would have found a population kindlydisposed to them

and a climate not unfavourable to their health andvigour. It was

therefore determined that they should be sent tocolonies where a

Puritan could hope to inspire little sympathy, andwhere a labourer

born in the temperate zone could hope to enjoy littlehealth. Such

was the state of the slave market that these bondmen,long as was

the passage, and sickly as they were likely to prove,were still very

valuable. It was estimated by Jeffreys that, on anaverage, each of them,

after all charges were paid, would be worth from ten tofifteen pounds…

The misery of the exiles fully equaled that of thenegroes who are now

carried from Congo to Brazil… more than one fifth ofthose who were

shipped were flung to the sharks before the end of thevoyage… Of ninety-nine

44

convicts who were carried out in one vessel, twenty-twodied before they

reached Jamaica… They were, therefore, in such a statethat the

merchant to whom they had been consigned found itexpedient to

fatten them before selling them.58

In this passage, Macaulay’s sins are sins of omission. There is

nothing remarkable in it, nothing to distinguish this treatment

from the same treatment received by tens of thousands of others

who had undergone the same fate, and for much less than the

charge of treason, of which the rebels were convicted. There is

only one word that is used here that does not appear in most

official accounts of white servants: the word “slaves.”

It is possible that Macaulay chose to describe them as

slaves because slavery was, in the evolving Whig propaganda of

mythical English ancient constitutions and Anglo-Saxon liberty,

the greatest blow that could be inflicted on a free man; not the

people, but free men. Macaulay deliberately ignored the history

of villeins, serfs, and thralls, or the realities of white

servitude in the English countryside that persisted during his

58 Macaulay, The History of England: 124-126. The Royal Warrants did not mention slavery. In Jamaica, which was colonized by Cromwellian non-conformistforces, some of the convicts did find a “population kindly disposed to them.”

45

life (and long after his death). In the finest traditions of

seventeenth-century tracts and pamphlets, eighteenth-century

coffee house gossip, and nineteenth-century tabloid fodder,

calling the convicted rebels slaves as victims of royalist Tories

was a coup de grace, a deliberate swipe at Victorian Tories. It

was a shrewd, calculated move, and a prime example of a highly

selective history. It did not implicate his Whig predecessors who

had enthusiastically participated in the trade in white Irish and

Scottish slaves and English kidnap victims.

It may also have been a bold, if oblique, move to expose the

truth of white servitude, since he could not have made such a

statement unwittingly. As a preeminent scholar, colonial civil

servant, and experienced Member of Parliament, Macaulay was of

necessity intimately acquainted with all aspects of colonial

labor. His first-hand experience with the Irish would have

equipped him with intimate knowledge of their fates. His

experience with the East Indies, and India in particular, is

evident in his comments of the subjugation of inferior races. As

a central figure in nineteenth-century emancipation proceedings

he would have had detailed knowledge of the history of black

46

slavery. Every one of these elements is contained in the above

passage, including the use of white Englishmen as slaves.

In the remainder of Macaulay’s discussion of the so-called

Glorious Revolution, or the Dutch invasion of William of Orange,

Macaulay is noticeably more circumspect in discussing black

slavery. He alludes only briefly and blithely to the presence of

African slaves in Britain, a seldom-discussed feature of English

history, with

Macclesfield at the head of two hundred gentlemen,mostly of English blood… Each was attended by a negro, broughtfrom the sugar plantations on the coast of Guiana. Thecitizens of Exeter, who had never seen so many specimens of theAfrican race, gazed with wonder on those black faces set off byembroidered turbans and white feathers.59

A curious feature of this passage is the absence of any

condemnation of African slavery as practiced by the triumphant

Whig and Dutch invaders who deposed James II. Macaulay the

emancipationist does not say whether the attendants were free; by

59 Ibid., 261. Guiana was a Dutch colony; the Dutch had introduced plantation sugar cultivation to British Barbados, which spread rapidly to Jamaica after that island’s conquest by Cromwell. It is interesting that in this reference Macaulay uses “English” blood, and not the Anglo-Saxon trope ofWhig nationalist propaganda.

47

his failure to mention the fact, it is safe to assume they were

plantation slaves, since Macaulay would certainly have

capitalized on their status otherwise. It is impossible to know

if they were employed in the Netherlands, or whether in fact they

had accompanied English masters overseas, and were returning home

with them. William III is known to have had black slaves in

England.60

Equally curious is Macaulay’s intentional dismissal of

earlier government confiscations and transports of political

opponents, notably during the Commonwealth under Cromwell a mere

thirty years prior to Monmouth’s Rebellion. In fact, the Stuarts

had merely continued the policies of Cromwell, who had

transported tens of thousands of political prisoners “captured

and given or sold into bondage,” chiefly from Ireland, Wales, and

60 Hackwood cites numerous examples of African slavery in England in theeighteenth century, including ads for runaways, slave auctions, and slave hardware such as collars. “Mention is made in The Tatler [periodical] of 1710 ofthe metal collars worn by negro slaves; and in the Museum of the Scottish Society of Antiquaries is a brass collar which was worn in 1701 by a criminal – a Scotsman – who, after being condemned to death, was respited to perpetual servitude. At Hampton Court is a bust of the favourite slave of William III – whom history labels as a ‘champion of English liberty’ – wearing a collar and padlock.” (p. 360) According to Hackwood, “it was computed that in 1764 there were 20,000 to 30,000 of them [black slaves] domiciled in England.” (p. 361)

48

Scotland, to newly settled Caribbean colonies. By one account, in

1655 alone

…some 8,000 had thus found their way to Barbados, some4,000more into other possessions, and even some 800 intoFrench Guadeloupe, besides other thousands who had been sentto or who had found refuge on the continent… The newpossessionof Jamaica, it was reported, suffered from the scarcityof women, and it was voted by the committee of the Councilin England – though the suggestion does not seem to havebeen carried out – that a thousand girls and a thousand boysbe sent thither from Ireland… The scheme of sending out delinquents seems not to have appealed to GovernorSearle of Barbados, who declined to take responsibility forthem until he had definite orders from the Protector as to

their disposal.61

61 Bonde’s diary in Swedish archives, and Searle to Cromwell (Sep. 3, 1655), in Wilbur Cortez Abbott, The Writings and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell, Volume III, TheProtectorate 1653-1655 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945): 821-822. Brailsford alludes to Cromwell’s sale of prisoners “as cannon-fodder, to the Venetian Republic,” and the offer for sale of “One lot of 2,000 Scots” to France and Spain (p. 334). The centuries-old sale of white (and other) slaves by Venetiantraders is well known. The sale into slavery of political prisoners to foreignmerchants, as well as English, was termed by Brailsford “among the inarticulate undertones of British history.” (p. 334)

49

In Macaulay’s words, “Whether, in the great transfer of estates,

injustice had or had not been committed, was immaterial… To

reverse it would be to unfix the foundations of society.”62

Bygone wrongs to political opponents of English rulers were

offset by English economic prosperity, unless of course those

rulers were opponents of Whigs and their allies. Macaulay

provides a perfect case in point by recounting William of

Orange’s order of “extirpation” and massacre of Scottish rebels

in Glencoe a mere three years after assuming the English throne.

Macaulay claims that William did not actually read the order, and

“probably understood” that the rebel clan members “who could be

proved to have been guilty… were to be sent to the army in the

Low Countries, that others were to be transported to the American

plantations.”63 Not only is William exonerated of the murders,

but the transportation and sale of political enemies for forced

labor was effectively deemed benign. Macaulay did not elaborate

on the intended terms or conditions of their labor; no mention

was made of slavery in their case. But they were not Whigs.

62 Macaulay, The History of England, 150.63 Ibid., 423.

50

White servitude in conditions of slavery was not limited to

the English. English planters bought French and Dutch slaves, and

Englishmen were enslaved on foreign plantations and pressed into

service with foreign armies and as galley slaves. Little is known

about the fates of Danish and Swedish conditions of servitude in

the Caribbean. Germanic bond servants, or Redemptioners, featured

prominently in the North American colonies in the eighteenth

century. By all available accounts, white bond-slavery was common

to all nations of Western Europe involved in the Atlantic world

beginning in the seventeenth century.

During the seventeenth century Englishmen were often

imprisoned and enslaved as a result of maritime and land-based

conflicts with Ottoman vassals in North African Barbary States.

While next to nothing is known about the lives or fates of the

West Indian bond slaves of the Bloody Assizes, the accounts of

ransomed or escaped English slaves from Algerian or other

African, Turkish, and Arabic captors gave rise to a hugely

popular literary genre during the period; Daniel Defoe’s Robinson

Crusoe, although clearly an allegorical “fable of exile,” is part

51

of that tradition.64 In another tale of 1675 by a former Barbary

English slave, the author states

The truth is, in time we were so habituated to Bondage,thatwe almost forgot Liberty, and grew stupid, and senslessofour Slavery… Long Bondage breaks the Spirits, itscattersHope off, and discourages all attempts for Freedom.Evil isthe unmaning, and dispiriting of the Soul to worthyActions; for we are apt to put on the Temper and Spirit ofSlaves withthe habit.65

In the words of one scholar, even an unremarkable man could “take

on a strange attractiveness when maintained under real stress, in

a wilderness or among blood-thirsty infidels.”66 The genre was so

powerful that American abolitionists such as Charles Sumner used

the accounts to generate “sympathy for the present plight of

African [slaves].”67

64 Michael Seidel, “Crusoe in Exile.” PMLA, Vol. 96, No. 3 (May, 1981): 364.

65 William Okeley, Ebenezer: Or, A Small Monument of Great Mercy, Appearing in the Miraculous Deliverance of William Okeley [et al.] From the Miserable Slavery of Algiers (1675): 21-22. Cited in G.A. Starr, “Escape from Barbary: A Seventeenth-Century Genre.” Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Nov., 1965): 38.

66 Starr, 37.67 Ibid., 51.

52

With the exception of Macaulay’s Whig martyrs, the whites

enslaved by their own white countrymen apparently did not

generate public sympathy or romantic tales of suffering and

redemption. This may in part be due to the fact that terms like

stress, wilderness, and blood-thirsty infidels could not be

applied to English society, at home or abroad, not least because

vocal political opponents of English nobility and landed gentry

were subject to libel suits, fines, imprisonment, transportation,

or execution for treason under statutes in effect, in varying

degrees, from as early as 1497 until they were abolished in

1887.68 A few victims of transportation lived to tell the tale,

but they received no hero’s welcome upon returning to England, as

will be shown below.

Despite all that can be deduced about Macaulay’s views of

racism and slavery, he is curiously silent, perhaps deliberately,

on many issues central to this thesis. He believed that some

Englishmen were enslaved, or so he stated. While it is certain

that races deemed inferior to the English, such as Irish,

68 John C. Lassiter, “Defamation of Peers: The Rise and Decline of the Action for Scandalum Magnatum, 1497-1773.” The American Journal of Legal History, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Jul., 1978): 235.

53

African, or Indian were subjugated and enslaved for economic

purposes as a matter of course, the question of enslavement of

the English – by the English – seems more complicated. An

important element of this discussion that Macaulay evades

regarding Monmouth’s Rebels is the penal component of

enslavement; this was due perhaps to his belief that Stuart

authority was illegitimate. However inhumane, enslavement by

legitimate authority such as that of the Irish by Cromwell or the

Glencoe rebels by William III was par for the course.

Macaulay’s history is rife with contradiction, such as his

professed support of emancipation of some and enslavement of

others, or his espousal of liberty juxtaposed against his avowed

pride in the subjugation of inferior races. He provides no

discussion of servitude vis -à-vis slavery at home or in the

colonies. Macaulay’s descriptions of the racial differences with

the Irish referred to political and moral issues, and these do

fit the categories of religious and political persecution,

regardless of race or color or culture. In most, if not all

seventeenth-century political transportation and

bond-slavery/servitude/indenture/slavery, the single common

54

denominator that emerges from a Macaulay template of analysis is

the power-liberty equation and its relationship with the social

categories of free and unfree, regardless of class, race, color,

morals, religion, or any other bigotry.

In reductionist terms, those who had property had power,

enjoyed liberty, and determined who was free; all others were

unfree or at risk of becoming unfree, depending on whether or not

they had anything that those in power wanted, or if they

challenged those in power. Not surprisingly, this universal human

pattern worked for Cromwell and the Stuarts in the seventeenth

century, and was still working for Macaulay in the nineteenth,

but with a qualifier: only English power elites perceived as

legitimate could determine which English men or women would be

unfree. Englishmen enslaved by foreigners were romanticized as

victims. From this we may deduce that the disenfranchisement of

Stuart monarchs because of religion and politics effectively

rendered them foreign and therefore illegitimate. Class and race

were subjective, variable criteria that were used whenever it was

convenient or necessary; as Macaulay said, bigotry will never

want a pretense.

55

The seventeenth-century Whig synthesis of Anglo-Saxon

culture with its mythical ancient constitution energized and

validated a new political power base and national identity that

was ardently supported and perpetuated by Macaulay; other

existing groups were deemed enemies. When Whigs were persecuted

by their political and moral enemies, they became unfree victims

without power or liberty. Persecution resulted in more than

metaphorical slavery: its victims were often reduced to servitude

based on the feudal precedent of villeinage, which was

traditionally seen as a domestic form of slavery. To Macaulay,

enslavement of his fellow Whigs was worthy of martyrdom.

Enslavement of others was, for Macaulay at least, part of the

natural order of things.

56

3. Seeing the Tragedy for the First Time

About a hundred sail of Ships yearly visit this Iland…The Commodities these Ships bring to this Iland are,

Servants and Slaves, both men and women; Horses, Cattle, Assinigoes, Camells, Utensils… [and] all manner

Of working tooles for Trades-men…69 (Italics in text)

I think that those who are familiar with Americanhistorical literature will corroborate me when I say

that the two terms ‘servant’ and ‘slave’ weresynonymous in America. In England, in the seventeenth century, there was a technical

distinction between the two terms, ‘servant’ beinglimited to white slaves only, and ‘slave’ beingapplied to the whole of the whites deported bythe Rump and Cromwell, as well as to the blacks

sent to Barbados.70

It is nearly impossible to consult any history of

seventeenth-century Barbados without finding copious references

to Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes. In the

first quotation above from that work, it is unmistakable that

both servants and slaves were viewed as mere commodities in the

69 Richard Ligon, A True & Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (London: Peter Parker and Thomas Guy, 1657 and 1673). Reprinted by Frank Cass Publishers, London (1998): 40. Although unrelated to this thesis, the importation of camels as plantation beasts of burden has not been examined in any of the materials researched for this paper.

70 “Historian” (Anonymous), Review: “S. R. Gardiner’s Historical Method:The Laws regulating the status of white slaves under the Rump and Cromwell,” in Notes and Queries, s13-I, 185-188, Oxford: Oxford University Press (Sep. 8, 1923): 185. “Historian” may have been a nom de plume for Oxford historian J.G.Muddiman.

57

collective English consciousness of the time. Ligon, a wealthy

Royalist business agent, fled to Barbados in 1647 in the wake of

some bad investments. He returned to England in 1650, where he

penned his History while in prison for his former debts.71 His

description of the island is as thorough as any modern almanac.

His detailed discussion of every aspect of plantation life, from

the perspective of a contemporary observer, is unrivalled for

clarity. Its accuracy regarding conditions of white and black

servitude has been disputed only by twentieth-century historians

who cite a lack of corroborative physical evidence, despite the

existence of other narratives that shared the same perspective of

seventeenth-century accounts of whites as slaves, and not just in

Barbados. The earliest accounts of white colonial slavery

uncovered by research for this thesis actually occur in Bermuda

in 1617,72 ten years before the settlement of Barbados. Just as

71 Hugh Cahill, Review: A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbados. Book of the month – September 2007. Online Archives, King’s College London. <http: www.kcl.ac.uk/iss/archivespec/learn-exhib/spotlight/archive2006-7/lig.thml?m=print> (Accessed Feb. 10, 2011).

72 Michael J. Jarvis, In the Eye of All Trade: Bermuda, Bermudians, and the Maritime Atlantic World (Charlotte, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010): 30. “The word ‘slave’ first appears in a penal context in October 1617, but it wasapplied cross-racially: an assize court made ‘Symon the Negro’ a slave for a sexual offense…but also sentenced Nicholas Gabriel, a white planter, to slavery for seditious talk.” Gabriel’s slavery was in lieu of the death

58

Ligon had observed in Barbados, Jarvis has noted, “Differences in

race were readily visible within Bermuda’s charter generation,

but legal and social status blurred during a period when a white

man might be a company slave and black tenant farmers headed

their own households.”73 In a recent provocative article A. J.

Von Frank claims that colonial slavery was patterned after the

model of servitude, occupying an “intermediate status, for which

we have, really, no name.”74 In other words, it did not fit the

sentence (pg. 483). In 1626/27, Russell Fenn and Nathaniel Walters, convicted of “holding back tobacco from shipment to London,” were granted a reprieve from death and instead were made “slaves ‘of the colonie…perpetually’ during their lives” (pg. 483). William Bradford, governor of Plymouth Plantation, described the 1628 sale of servants in Virginia as merchants “selling their [servants’] time to other men”, while a controversial contemporary of his, oneThomas Morton, referred to the process as being “carried away and sold for slaves with the rest.” See William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647 (NY: Random House Inc., 1981): 226-227.

73 Ibid., 30. This statement provides insight into the coexistence of free blacks and enslaved whites, and is suggestive of preexisting social conditions which, transplanted from England, were exacerbated in the colonies.

74 Albert J. Von Frank, “John Saffin: Slavery and Racism in Colonial Massachusetts,” Early American Literature, Vol. 29, No. 3, 254-272 (1994): 256. Quoting records of the General Court of Plymouth, 1676-1677, colonial officials determined the fate of “Jethro,” a black who had been recaptured from warring Algonquins: “…to remain a servant unto the successors of the saidCaptain Willett, until two years be expired from the date hereof, and then to be freed from and sett at libertie from his said service…” Saffin owned a Spanish mulatto slave, who was sold on condition “that at the end of ten yearsthe man would be free.” Indian slaves were often sold out of the colony. In 1659 two whites were sold out of the colony. Thus, Von Frank argues, “…race was not the overriding consideration”. Von Frank also provides a primary source account of a visitor to a Virginia plantation in 1686 on which there were “twenty-six negro slaves and twenty Chrisitian” (p. 267). Von Frank disputes Winthrop D. Jordan’s claim that the practice of “white slavery” in the colonies had ended in 1642. Black and white servitude throughout the colonies existed under similar conditions, often referred to as slavery,

59

traditional black/white, slave/servant model that represents the

academic status quo.

In the second quote above, an anonymous reviewer took issue

in 1923 with several of nineteenth-century Whig historian Samuel

R. Gardiner’s points regarding Barbadian servitude, notably

Gardiner’s description of the lives of servants as “temporary

beatitude” that “ignored the savagery.”75 Instead, the reviewer

supported an important, apparently generally held, belief among

English scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries that servants and slaves in early English colonies were

the same in all but name. He took further issue with other claims

by Gardiner, adding “Servants were treated worse than the blacks…

They had no rights at all…” and “As Cromwell forbade his

deportees to return… deportation, except in the case of

handicraftsmen, meant slavery for life.”76

during the entire seventeenth century, and continued “on a very sporadic basisuntil the [American] Revolution.”

75 “Historian”, 186. Gardiner is best known for his four-volume History of the Great Civil War; his Whig history contained one of the few accounts of 1,500 Scottish prisoners from the 1651 Battle of Worcester sold to “work in the mines of Africa.” (Civil War, Vol. IV: 1647-1649, p. 207. Original 1893 edition reproduction by Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2009.)

76 “Historian”, 187.

60

Gardiner was not the only Whig historian to be closely

scrutinized around the turn of the twentieth century; R. G. Usher

in 1915 had described Gardiner’s work as “typically vague Whig

terminology” and considered “the differences between Gardiner and

his Whig predecessors minimal.”77 Usher believed that Gardiner’s

history was intended to reconcile nineteenth-century Tory-Whig

differences, which was an “internal impossibility.”78 Without so

much as reading a word of Gardiner’s text, it is consistently

clear from his Oxford critics that the Whig version of Barbadian

history was based on ideology rather than hard facts, a trait

with which readers of other Whig historians such as Macaulay are

instantly familiar. This begs the question: why were Whig

political historians so intent on playing down facts that were

generally accepted among other scholars, especially since other

political factions were also involved in enslaving whites?

Perhaps English domestic social reforms beginning in the

1830s had precipitated a crisis of conscience, because beginning

77 P. B. M. Blaas, “Presuppositions of Whig Historical Writing,” Continuityand Anachronism: Parliamentary and Constitutional Development in Whig Historiography and in the Anti-Whig Reaction between 1890 and 1930. (The Hague, Netherlands: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978): 41.

78 Ibid., 42.

61

in the mid-nineteenth century there was a clear trend in English

historiography to examine the fates of white slaves in the former

Caribbean and American colonies. The trend seems to have gained

little traction; works were sporadic and appear to have largely

faded into oblivion by 1930, by which time the Empire had begun

to implode. Political and social unrest were widespread from

China to India to Africa and the Caribbean in the wake of World

War I and in the midst of the Great Depression. In the twenty

years following World War II, the Empire was wound down, as one

colony after another gained independence. It was in this period

that the English were doubtless beginning to reconcile themselves

with the fundamental contradictions of Empire, and to dispel many

of its associated myths in the baggage train of a synthetic

collective consciousness and national identity. A perfect example

of this change can be observed in an obscure cultural corner:

West End stage productions of Shakespeare’s Othello. In the 1830s,

reactions to an Othello played by a black actor elicited violent

reactions and scathing reviews; Victorians were fine with a tawny

Moor, but not a black. Attitudes had begun to change by the 1860s

and 1870s. When Paul Robeson, the black American actor, played

62

Othello from the 1930s to the 1950s, he received glowing

tributes. A leading theater critic wrote in 1943, “I felt like I

was seeing the tragedy for the first time… The performance

convinced me, in short, that a Negro Othello is essential to the

full understanding of the play.”79

It was evidently easier to let go of foreign prejudices than

those closer to home. The English government did not cope with

Ireland’s 1921 independence with quite the same equanimity: an

official rapprochement has only taken place in the past year.80

The subjugation of whites still struck a raw nerve when the white

slavery genre died out in the 1930s. The pendulum appears to have

swung full circle: a cursory internet search reveals that at

least forty-eight books dealing with white slavery have been

published or reissued since the early 1990s.81 Most of the titles79 Ruth Cowhig, “The Importance of Othello’s Race,” The Journal of

Commonwealth Literature, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 153-161 (Sep., 1977): 160-161.80 In May 2011, Queen Elizabeth II was the first British monarch to

visit Ireland since its independence in 1921. “Helping set the ghosts of history to rest, the queen laid wreaths in memory of fighters for Irish independence and Irish soldiers who fought for Britain in the first world war.” Staff writer, “The queen in Ireland: Irish, and British, eyes are smiling.” The Economist Online (May 19, 2011). <http://www.economist.com/node/18713858.html> (Accessed Oct. 6, ,2011).

81 Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America (2008); Paul Baepler, White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives (1999); Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary coast and Italy, 1500-1800 (2004); Michael A. HoffmanII, They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early

63

deal with Irish slaves. The reason for the sudden popularity of

this topic may only be speculated upon; it is possible that the

Irish and their descendants, at home and in the global diaspora,

are seeking redress and closure. Whatever the reason, public

awareness of this topic is sure to dispel a false historical

consciousness, as one web page states,

Why is it so seldom discussed? Do the memories of hundreds

of thousands of Irish victims merit more than a mentionfrom

an unknown writer?…. if anyone, black or white, believes that

slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it

completely wrong…These are the lost slaves; the ones that time

and biased history books conveniently forgot.82

On the other side of the metaphorical line in the sand,

traditional scholars of the status quo might argue that authors

America (1993); Elizabeth Keckley, Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave, and Four Years in the White House (2010); Richard Hildreth, The White Slave: another Picture of Slave Life in America (2001); Sean O’Callaghan, The Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland (2001); George Labedz, The Boy Who Would Be Free (2002); The White Slaves of England; Being True Pictures of Certain Social Conditions in the Kingdom of England in the year 1897 (2010); Margit Stange, Personal Property: Wives, White Slaves, and the Market in Women (2002); and Nora Glickman, The Jewish White Slave Trade and the Untold Story of Raquel Liberman (1999) are but a few of the titles in the genre.

82 John Martin, “White Slavery: The Slaves That Time Forgot.” http://www.afgen.com/forgotten_slaves.html (Accessed Jan. 28, 2011).

64

in this new genre are perpetuating a romantic fiction, and

creating a false historical consciousness of their own.

Were there white slaves or not? Macaulay was not simply

using a derogatory term, or rhetorical flourish. Many English

historians, and not just Whigs, believed whites had been

enslaved. But an equal or greater number of modern historians

insist that they were not. Why the denial?

Both literally and figuratively, the answer is not cast in

black and white.83 The modern discussion of temporary vis-à-vis

permanent enslavement is based on “multiple forms of

enslavement;” as John Donoghue contends, “Unfortunately,

historians have not made use of this contemporary language,”84

i.e. the language of the seventeenth century white bond-slaves

and their masters. The problem for many scholars is the lack of

83 See Donald R. Wright, “Recent Literature on Slavery in Colonial NorthAmerica,” Organization of American Historians Magazine of History, Vol. 17, No. 3, Colonial Slavery (Apr., 2003): 5-9. Wright provides a detailed bibliographicalessay of the corpus of late twentieth-century American slavery literature, andconcludes that “…matters larger than race were among the most important factors in determining the formation of colonial institutions…” and “That we have emphasized race, to the exclusion of other categories, in colonial African American history may speak more about contemporary American society than the society of colonial North America two centuries ago.”

84 John Donoghue, “’Out of the Land of Bondage’: The English Revolution and the Atlantic Origins of Abolition,” The American Historical Review, Vol. 115, No.4, pp. 943-974 (Oct., 2010): 951.

65

documentary or physical evidence to support anecdotal accounts of

white slavery, let alone in different forms.85 Most field

laborers, assuming they were literate, probably did not have

ready access to pen and paper or spare time for intellectual

pursuits. The owners of slaves and servants in West Indian

colonies used a very vague cover-all term to describe the usage

of laborers: the custom of the country. Interpretation of this

custom was subject to vagaries of economic and political

conditions, and was seldom agreed upon in different milieus of

society. Servants and slaves formed a common social category, and85 See Jerome S. Handler and Frederick W. Lange, Plantation Slavery in Barbados:

An Archaeological and Historical Investigation (New York: toExcel, 1999 reprint of 1978 original). Excavations of Newton plantation in Barbados over a twenty year period beginning in 1972 attempted to identify slave graveyards, but yielded few details of use, since “The assemblage of collected and excavated artifacts…consists almost entirely of materials that could have been availableto or utilized by freedmen and whites of various socioeconomic strata as well as by slaves…” (p. 132). Further, “Slavery is an institution of variable structure that cannot be inferred, deduced, or otherwise derived from purely archaeological remains… because archaeological data do not identity slave status and slavery. The fact that there were blacks in Barbados who were free,Amerindians who were either free or slave, and poor whites who were free or indentured servants (but who lived at the same low economic level as some freedmen and even black slaves) is also a cause for interpretative concern when only artifactual or skeletal remains are used.” (p. 228). Detailed bioanthropological and forensic analysis in 1997 and 1998 of commingled and other plantation human remains at the site have provided interesting information regarding disease, dietary and alcohol consumption patterns, as well as high lead toxicity. Unfortunately, the site is too recent to use conventional dating methods. However, the author of the 1997 study could not rule out the presence of Europeans and Africans in common graves. Source: Dr. Kristrina Shuler, Asst. Prof. of Biological Anthropology, Auburn University, in personal e-mail correspondence of Sep. 30, 2011. Note Prof. Handler’s status quo juxtaposition of indentured whites and black slaves.

66

only warranted discussion in the same political and economic

contexts as sugar cane harvests, credit facilities, or other

commodities. With few exceptions, there was apparently little

interest in servants as people until the nineteenth century.

A list of Monmouth’s rebels who were transported was

published in a book in 1874, which provided names of merchants to

whom they were consigned for sale, the ships on which they

sailed, and partial lists of those who died at sea or shortly

after arrival in the West Indies.86 This list is valuable not

only for its contents, but also for the title of the book, since

it breaks down into nineteenth-century social groups what has

been known under the broad and often inaccurate indentured servant

label: “Persons of Quality,” presumably a reference to class,

including emigrants, religious exiles, political rebels, serving

men sold for a term of years, apprentices, children stolen,

maidens pressed, and others. Thus, in late Victorian England there

was apparently considerable public interest in the fates of

86 John Camden Hotten, Ed., “Monmouth’s Rebellion of 1685. Lists of the ‘Convicted Rebels’ Sent to the Barbadoes and Other Plantations in America,” inThe Original Lists of Persons of Quality; Emigrants; Religious Exiles; Political Rebels; Serving Men Sold For a Term of Years; Apprentices; Children Stolen; Maidens Pressed; and Others Who Went from Great Britain to the American Plantations, 1600-1700. London: John Camden Hotten (1874): 315-344. Hereafter Hotten’s Lists.

67

transported Englishmen; of particular interest are the different

labels applied to the groups. Indentured servants are but a

single group among many. Not all servants were indentured, and

many were slaves.

Another important example of these distinctions can be seen

in, of all places, an 1893 article in The Popular Science Monthly

magazine, written by a British Army colonel serving in Sierra

Leone, West Africa. Col. Ellis wrote authoritatively, quoting

often from Cromwell’s correspondence, that

between the years 1649 and 1690 a lively trade was carried on

between England and the ‘plantations,’ as the colonies were then

termed, in political prisoners, who were sentenced to banishment

in the former country and shipped to the colonies, where they were

sold by auction to the colonists for various terms of years, sometimes

for life, as slaves.87

Ellis contends that

in the West Indies…where no term was mentioned the slavery

87 Colonel A. B. Ellis, “White Slaves and Bond Servants in the Plantations,” The Popular Science Monthly, Vol. 42, No. 38, pp. 612-620 (March, 1893): 612. Colonel Ellis published another version of this article in a “popular British Guiana newspaper, the Argosy” in May of the same year. (See Beckles, footnote 81 (below): 53.)

68

was, before the law of 1681 (33 Charles II), for life. There is

still in existence in Jamaica a deed executed in the secretary’s

office in November, 1671, between Robert Nelson and Thomas

Pitts, by which the former, in consideration of the sumof L.10,

conveys to the latter and his heirs forever one white servant

named Stephen Ayliff.88

In the remainder of the article, Col. Ellis’ account largely

repeats Macaulay, with some glaring exceptions, such as the

statement that Monmouth’s Rebels “were the last who were ever

sold into bondage beyond the seas and consigned to slavery.”89 No

source is provided for this claim. Ellis makes a clear

distinction between convicts and bond-servants; the latter were

voluntary, “in theory at least,” but their “condition was little

better than that of the convict-slaves.”90

A rector of Jamestown, Virginia, described three categories

in 1724: “Such as come upon certain wages by Agreement for a

certain Time; such as come by indenture, commonly called Kids,

who are usually to serve four or five years; and those convicts 88 Ibid., 613.89 Ibid., 616. Ellis ignored William III’s treatment of Scottish

prisoners.90 Ibid., 617.

69

or Felons that are transported…they frequently there meet with

the End they deserved at Home…their being sent thither to work as

Slaves for Punishment is not a mere Notion.”91

Other recent historians have devised their own categories

for early white plantation laborers. From the perspective of

juridical studies and political science, bond-slavery has been

referred to as “political murder” or “political violence” which

operated within a framework of three forms: “feudings among

power-seekers within a dominant class; pressure by power-holders

on those who have to supply their daily bread; and –far less

common – resistance by these, or their champions, to the

exploiters.” The author of the latter study sought to distinguish

between the fates of “humble commoners” and victims of political

persecution.92

Possibly the most comprehensive comparative study of white

servitude and black slavery, published in 1989, broke down white 91 Quoted in Peter Wilson Coldham, Emigrants in Chains: A Social History of Forced

Emigration to the Americas of Felons, Destitute Children, Political and Religious Non-Conformists, Vagabonds, Beggars, and other Undesirables 1607-1776 (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Co., Inc., 1992): 63. Coldham provides a detailed history of the evolution of the trade in bonded whites based on primary sources.

92 V. G. Kiernan, Review: “Political Murder: From Tyrrannicide to Terrorism,” by Franklin L. Ford (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), in The English Historical Review, Vol. 102, No. 402, pp. 168-170 (Jan., 1987):169.

70

servitude into four basic categories: “voluntary servants,” the

“defenseless poor,” political prisoners, and convicts.93

Regardless of the group of origin, once in Barbados the servant

was reduced to coercive labor that often exceeded the terms of

transportation. Beckles cites the biography of a former servant,

John Menzies, who was banished from Scotland in 1676, in which

Menzies stated, “sugar planters generally considered it their

duty to maintain the servitude of political and religious

prisoners beyond the ten-year stipulation.”94 In 1680, the

governor of Barbados wrote to the Lords of Trade and Plantations

that “It is forbidden under a considerable penalty of sugar to

bury any Christian servant until so many freeholders of the

neighborhood have viewed the corpse to make sure that he may not

have met a violent death at the hands of his master.”95 In one 93 Hilary McD. Beckles, White Servitude and Black Slavery in Barbados, 1627-1715,

(Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press 1989): 6-9.94 Ibid., 54. The difference in term lengths seems to be a key factor in

distinguishing convicts from indentures. The ten-year limit was obviously not created by James II.

95 Cited in Warren B. Smith, Colonial Servitude in South Carolina, (Columbia, SC:University of South Carolina Press, 1961): 82. Smith provides a comprehensive bibliographical essay of scholarly research into colonial servitude by U.S. authors from 1895 to 1940. Among the ten authors discussed by Smith, the one theme agreed on by all was that white servitude was the foundation of the colonial plantation labor system, and was tantamount to slavery. Smith claimedthat “those who have ignored the white servant element have always thought in terms of the black majorities of a later date…” and that the black slavery paradigm became fully established only around the middle of the eighteenth

71

reference after another, the treatment of servants can be shown

to be equal to, and often worse than, that of black slaves, as

the former were considered expendable. Warren B. Smith and Peter

Wilson Coldham provide numerous archival records that document

the abuses of servitude well into the mid-eighteenth century

throughout the colonies; it was not until 1718 that a

Transportation Act was passed to deal with the “export of felons

as a business in its own right.”96 In spite of this difference,

it was still necessary for the Virginia Assembly in 1748 to

ensure that “transported convicts should receive less generous

treatment than indentured servants.”97

century (pg. viii). Smith’s foundational references included: James Curtis Ballagh, “White Servitude in the Colony of Virginia,” Johns Hopkins University Studiesin Historical and Political Science, XIII (1895); John Spencer Bassett, “Slavery and Servitude in the Colony of North Carolina,” Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science, XIV (1896); Karl F. Geiser, “Redemptioners and Indentured Servants in the Colony and Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” Supplement to Yale Review (1901); Eugene Irving McCormac, “White Servitude in Maryland, 1634-1820,” JHU Studies in Historical and Political Science, XXII (1904); A. Maurice Low, The American People: A Study in National Psychology (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1911); Theo. D. Jervey, “The White Indentured Servants of South Carolina,” The South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine, XII (1911); Elizabeth Donnan, “The Slave Trade into South Carolina Before the Revolution,” The American Historical Review, XXXIII (1927-28); Dr. Arthur Henry Hirsch, The Huguenots of Colonial South Carolina (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1928); Robert L. Meriwether, The Expansion of South Carolina, 1729-1765 (Kingsport: Southern Publishers, Inc.,, 1940); and Abbot Emerson Smith, Colonists in Bondage (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North CarolinaPress, 1947).

96 Coldham, 71.97 Ibid., 65. The legislation of separate treatment for convicts and

indentured servants suggests that they had previously received similar treatment for over a century.

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Forced transportation, as opposed to voluntary migration,

from England to the colonies was originally penal in nature.

Coldham has traced its origins from a 1584 suggestion by Hakluyt

to the first piece of legislation under Queen Elizabeth I in 1597

that “specifically sanctioned the transportation overseas of

rogues and vagabonds,” and later to the 1606 designation of

Virginia as a “place where idle vagrants may be sent.”98 The

Privy Council of James I institutionalized the practice by Acts

of 1615 and 1619; in the latter, there is no doubt as to the

intended nature of such servitude, wherein those transported

…may be constrained to toyle in such heavey and painefull workes

as such a servitude shalbe a greater terror to them than death it selfe,

and therefore of better example since execucions are socommon

as that wicked and irreligious sorts of people are no way thereby moved

or deterred from offending…99

The same Act stipulated that those criminals who remained in

England were subject to forced labor and should be “kept in

chaynes in the houses of correction or other places…with food and

98 Ibid., 41.99 The Act of Privy Council was dated November 6, 1619. Quoted in

Coldham, 44.

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raiment as shalbe for necessitie of life and no more.”

Transportation, it may safely be said, was intended to be a fate

worse than death. It is worth noting that crimes warranting these

punishments did not include murder, rape, witchcraft, or

burglary, for which the death penalty was mandated.100 The

practice of transportation was extended to include religious and

political prisoners by Cromwell, and was continued by later

Stuarts and Hanoverians alike throughout the seventeenth century

and well into the eighteenth. In Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders,

written in 1683, servants “were of two sorts; either, first, such

as were brought over by masters of ships to be sold as servants…

more properly called slaves. Or, secondly, such as are

transported from Newgate and other prisons, after having been

found guilty of felony and other crimes punishable with death… we

make no difference; the planters buy them, and they work together

in the field till their time is out.”101

Status quo traditionalists who deny the existence of white

colonial slavery cite laws regulating the status of white

100 Ibid., 43-44.101 Daniel Defoe, The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders (Reprint,

Lexington, KY: Filiquarian Publishing, LLC, 2010): 54-55.

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servants in Barbados as early as 1646 as proof of their non-slave

status; the most complete set of such laws was published in 1651

and 1654 by the Barbados Assembly, but “became inoperative by the

King’s restoration in 1660.”102 All that can be deduced from these

laws is that they became the first to regulate the conditions of

white bond labor; the corollary is that the conditions were

unregulated prior to this period. Compared to the laws in other

American colonies (above), it is evident that a marked shift in

official policy toward white and black servitude began in the

1640s, the same time that large-scale sugar planting was

introduced in Barbados. But laws in theory are not the same as

social practice, especially when the magistrates, juries, and

other officials charged with enforcing the laws were nearly

always the same planters who abused the laws. Enforcement was not

regular by any means, and was often used as a maneuvering device

by which competing planters sought economic advantage over one

another in the ever-changing political climate.

Perhaps the key to understanding slavery, in all its forms,

as it evolved throughout the seventeenth century is encapsulated 102 “Historian”, 185. The laws are virtually identical to traditional

codes governing serfs and villeins.

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in the writings of the preeminent Whig theoretician and

Enlightenment philosopher John Locke. In his Two Treatises of

Government, Locke justified enslavement of captives in what he

subjectively termed “just wars,” and decried enslavement under

“arbitrary power.”103 To Locke, “the perfect condition of Slavery…

is nothing else, but the State of War continued, between a lawful

103 Quoted in James Farr, “‘So Vile and Miserable an Estate’: The Problem of Slavery in Locke’s Political Thought.” Political Theory, Vol. 14, No. 2, 263-289 (May, 1986): 264. Locke was not original in his thinking, but merely expounded on, and refined concepts expressed by Sir Walter Raleigh. See“A Discourse of the original and fundamental cause of natural, arbitrary, necessary, and unnatural war,” in The Collected Works of Sir Walter Raleigh, kt., now first collected: To which are prefixed the lives of the author by Oldys and Birch, Vol. VIII, 253-297 (Burt Franklin research and source works series, 73. New York: Burt Franklin, 1965): Raleigh referred to a “necessary war” as one required by overpopulationand famine: “…when any country is overlaid by the multitude which live upon it, there is a natural necessity compelling it to disburden itself, and lay the load upon others, by right or wrong.” (p. 256) Raleigh differentiated between subjugation by war, which was “violence sanctioned by authority,” and the “violence inflicted upon slaves, or yielding malefactors.” (p. 253) Further, Raleigh felt that a man in power “will seek to draw those that are not wholly his own into entire subjection…from the condition of followers and dependants, into mere vassalage.” (p. 268) Like other Enlightenment thinkers such as Hobbes, Raleigh felt that social class was determined by projection ofpower, sometimes violent, which was “a mere state of nature.” (p. 279) Of primary interest here, Raleigh, writing in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, refers to three categories of coerced labor: slaves, as a natural social state; criminals; and political enemies. All were relegated to the same social class. In “The discovery of Guiana” (ibid., 391-476), Raleigh discusses enslavement of Amerindians by their own kind in 1595, and compares the state of that slavery with practices in Africa and Asia (p. 416);he also reveals that among his crew he “had a negro, a very proper young fellow” (p. 427). Race was a matter of lineage and blood and was linked to nationality: in “The reign of William the First” (ibid., 521-537), the offspring of the Norman invader, by his marriage to “Margaret, the sister of Edgar, by whom the blood of our ancient Saxon kings was conjoined with the Norman in Henry the Second, … became English again.” (p. 524) Thus we find that race and social class were not necessarily always linked in the early 1600s, as was the case in Othello.

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Conqueror, and a captive” in keeping with the “demands of

Justice.”104 The lives of convicts and captives were forfeit;

slavery was actually seen as a form of mercy, since it spared

their lives, and allowed them to perform a useful function for

society which might lead to redemption and even manumission.

Locke was, however, as contradictory as his times: as an investor

and member of the Royal African Company, he supported hereditary

bondage, despite the fact that he had written against it as

unjust. Locke epitomized the difference between practice and

theory, or economic expedience and lofty idealism. To modern

readers, this must appear hypocritical; but in the 1600s,

Europeans were intent on reconciling a new economic reality with

new political ideology by adapting existing social structures.

The result was a state of contradiction without clear boundaries

or definitions.

What is clear from reading Locke is that, by the late

seventeenth century, a formerly homogeneous vague concept of

servitude, with diverse sources and practices, was evolving in

political and social discourse into a clear concept of slavery

104 Farr, 270.

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based on the subjugation of enemy prisoners and convicted

criminals. Locke’s “State of War continued” was deeply

insightful: it acknowledged, perhaps unwittingly, the constant

state of tension inherent in violent coercion that led to servant

and slave rebellions on plantations. He highlighted the

legitimacy of the “conqueror” over unfree subjects, regardless of

race or color; after all, both white convicts and Africans were

captives, and by extension “perfect slaves.” Locke was not

proposing a new social system; he was refining and justifying one

that already existed, in which some servants were acknowledged to

be slaves.

The steadily diminishing supply of white labor and the

corresponding dramatic increase in the availability of African

labor meant that the slave population was increasingly black, so

that discourse on slavery necessarily began to focus on blacks.

Since racism already existed, as Balfour is quoted above, “race

became class” over the course of the eighteenth century. The

first clear legislation regarding the status of black slaves was

passed in the Barbados Assembly in 1668, with additional acts

passed in 1688 and 1692. Other legislation governing slaves’

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behavior, but not their status, was passed in 1664, 1677, and

1696.105 The 1660s dates of legislation coincide with the point at

which total black population figures exceeded total whites after

1660.106 The landmark legislation identifying blacks as real

estate “and not chattels” in perpetuity “unto the heirs and

widows” was an Act of Queen Anne in 1705.107

Notwithstanding this social trend, whites remained fair game

for enslavement for Locke and his Whig, and non-Whig,

contemporaries wherever labor was needed. Samuel Pepys, seeking

slaves to man ships for the Admiralty, “makes no mention in his

Tangier papers of Negroes or black Africans as such.” Rather,

like Locke, he “regarded the enslavement of prisoners as a normal

matter.”108 Slaves in the Mediterranean were not necessarily Moors

or blacks; many Europeans were pressed into service, similar to

105 Frank Wesley Pitman, “The Treatment of the British West Indian Slaves in Law and Custom,” The Journal of Negro History, Vol. 11, No. 4, 610-628 (Oct., 1926): 613-614.

106 Based on compilation of demographic figures from primary sources in Hilary McD. Beckles, “Rebels and Reactionaries: The Political Responses of White Labourers to Planter-Class Hegemony in Seventeenth-Century Barbados.” The Journal of Caribbean History,Vol. 15, pp. 1-20 (1981): table 1, page 6.

107 . PBS, “Original Documents,” The Slave Experience: Legal Rights & Government. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/experience/legal/docs1.html (Accessed Jan. 30,2011).

108 G. E. Aylmer, “Slavery under Charles II: the Mediterranean and Tangier,” The English Historical Review, Vol. 114, No. 456, 378-388 (Apr., 1999): 388.

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kidnapped indentures, often with specified term lengths.

Transportation to the colonies was for many simply another

option, but the decision was not made by the slave.

It becomes apparent that in the seventeenth-century English

mind enslavement was an appropriate punishment for prisoners,

whether taken in war or convicted of crimes; they were seen as a

separate unfree class, regardless of race or color. Kidnapped

civilians for plantation service were, in a sense, captives,

although unjustly so by the letter of the law. The law was for

many profiteers a mere technicality or hindrance to the illicit

trade, or black market; this is one reason why a review of laws

alone cannot provide an accurate depiction of actual social

events. Planters wanted laborers, and were unscrupulous as to

where they came from, although they expressed a dislike of the

Irish, who were “the worst, many of them being even good for

nothing but mischief.”109 A planter named Jeaffreson wrote from

109 Jeaffreson, 259. It is difficult in the extreme for a modern reader to understand how English planters did not seem to care, or try to understand why Irish men and women, dispossessed of homes and families, imprisoned and enslaved, were less than enthusiastic servants on the plantations. The inference is that, in the seventeenth-century mind, such treatment was perfectly natural. Both as an inferior race and prisoners of war they were subjugated and forced into servitude; this reasoning explains Macaulay’s slavery as their “fit portion.”

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London to his St. Kitts constituents in 1682, “the kidnabbers and

their employers have beene brought into such troubles, that

servants are now more hard to come by than ever.”110 Referring to

the crackdown by Stuart justices, Jeaffreson explained further,

“…the Lord Chief Justice hath so severely handled the kidnabbers,

and so encouraged all informers against them, that it is very

difficult to procure any. One of the kidnabbers, a slopseller,

hath been fined five hundred pounds sterling…”111 The lucrative

trade in white servants, both convict and illicit, was corrupt

and unreliable; merchants and ship captains engaged in spiriting

began to lose interest when faced with steep fines and prison

sentences.

110 Ibid., 298: letter of September 25, 1682. Anyone who could kidnap another and deliver him or her to a merchant could make easy money. Politicians were among the worst offenders; Jeffreys jailed the mayor of Bristol for his role in the trade. The later Stuarts were the first to launch a sustained all-out assault on the spiriting trade.

111 Ibid., 317-318.

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A third category, that of voluntary indentures, had dwindled

to insignificance by the 1680s.112 Jeaffreson described why early

volunteers were willing to accept indenture:

How many broken traders, miserable debtors, pennilessspendthrifts, discontented persons, travelling heads

and scatter-brains would joyfully embrace such offers! –

the first,to shun their greedy creditors and loathsome gaolers…to

filltheir bellies though with the bread of affliction… to

leave an unkinde mistresse or dishonest wife, or something

worse…tosatisfie fond curiosity… These and the like humours

first peopledthe Indies, and made them a kinde of Bedlam for a short

tyme.But from such brain-sic humours have come many solid

andsober men, as these modern tymes testify…113

But the news of the treatment of servants as slaves in the

colonies had long since reached England’s shores. As early as

1664, a judge at the Old Bailey sessions in London recommended

“That such Prisoners as are Reprieved, with intent to be

112 Richard S. Dunn, “The Barbados Census of 1680: Profile of the Richest Colony in English America,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, vol. 26, No. 1, 3-30 (Jan., 1969): 7. According to Dunn, from 1655-1712 the white population had dropped by 50 percent, “while the black population had more than doubled.” This estimate is based primarily on the first Barbadian census of 1680.

113 Jeaffreson, 259.

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transported, be not sent away as perpetual Slaves, but upon

Indentures betwixt them and particular Masters…”114 In 1669, a

representative of the Carolina proprietors trying to recruit

servants in Ireland complained,

I did fully inlarge and explain [the conditions of servitude]

to all the persons that I thought fitt to take notice thereof, and

consulted with all such as I thought intelligent in those affaires

to advise mee how to raise such servants but hitherto Icould

not obteyne any, for the thing at present seemes new & forraigne

to them, & withal they have beene so terrified with theill

practice of them to the Carib Ileands, where they were sould

as slaves, that as yet they will hardly give credence to any

other usage.115

Things had not improved in 1682, when Jeaffreson wrote from

London, “I have had several in my eye; but, when we come to

114 Quoted in A.E. Smith, Colonists in Bondage: 108.115 Robert Southwell, from the State Papers in the South Carolina

Historical Collections V (1897). Quoted in ibid., 61. After the brutality and depopulation of Ireland under Cromwell within less than a decade of this letter, it seems impossible to believe that planters were so naïve as to thinkthat any Irish men or women would willingly sign indentures. It is nonethelessinteresting that some Irish transports had somehow managed to get word of plantation conditions back to Ireland. It is possible that Irish servants wereamong those who accompanied Barbadian planters involved in the settlement of Carolina.

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treat, they will not go on ordinary terms.”116 While there may

have been a legal difference between convicts and voluntary

indentures, the public consensus in England, Ireland, and the

colonies seemed to be that their actual treatment was no

different: they were slaves.

There were other reasons for the decline in voluntary

emigration to the colonies. Much has been made by economic

historians of the mass urban migrations of the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries in England, both as a result of failed

agriculture during a mini ice age, and of the enclosure

movement,117 by which public lands were fenced by large

landholders to pasture livestock herds. Large numbers of peasants

were faced with starvation or migration to urban centers where

employment opportunities were few and far between. The net

outcome was a large supply of idle labor and high crime rates

which accounted for the vagabonds and rogues so often referred to

in Tudor and early Stuart literature. Vagabondage was a felony,

116 Jeaffreson, 314: letter of November 15, 1682.117 According to Brailsford, in Levellers, p. 420: “The process of

enclosure was continuous, and spread over four centuries. It first attracted the hostile notice of Parliament towards the end of the fifteenth century, andit was still proceeding on a considerable scale in the early decades of the nineteenth.”

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punishable by imprisonment and transportation. It was thus that a

homeless, unemployed person could easily wind up on a plantation,

as indeed tens of thousands did.

An economic treatise of 1670 provides an excellent history

of the causes of England’s economic difficulties as laggards in

trade, “wherein we undo our selves, we are making hast to betake

our selves to our Plantations only, yet shall not be long able to

continue that Trade for want of shipping.”118 Global trade was a

fact of life for Europeans by the sixteenth century,119 but

England initially had difficulty competing with its continental

neighbors. The English economy had been in a steady downward

spiral since the time of Henry VIII; during his reign the pound

118 Roger Coke, A Discourse of Trade In two Parts. The first treats of The Reason of the Decay of the Strength, Wealth, and Trade of England. The latter, Of the Growth and Increase of the Dutch Trade above the English (London: H. Brome, 1670). http://www.socserv.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3113/coke/coke.tx2// (Accessed Sep. 21, 2011).

119 “Now there is not any prince or state of Europe, (the inland countries of Hungary and Transylvania excepted,) but the English have trade withal; yea, even with the Turk, Barbarian, Persian, and Indians…” in Sir Walter Raleigh, “A Discourse touching a match propounded by the Savoyan between the Lady Elizabeth and the Prince of Piedmont,” in The Collected Works of Sir Walter Raleigh, 223-236: 236. Raleigh correctly assessed that the Dutch would remain England’s chief trading obstacle, since “Holland and Zeeland are situate between us and our best trades, which are all eastward.” In “A Discourse touching a war with Spain, and of the protecting of the Netherlands,” ibid., 299-316: 302. Raleigh already envisioned English imperialdesigns: “The dispute is no less than of the government of the whole world...”Ibid., 316.

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was cumulatively devalued a total of eighty-three percent.

Elizabeth defaulted on sovereign loans in 1594, and England was

crippled by recurring foreign debt until the establishment of the

Bank of England by Parliament after 1688.120 The Spanish,

Portuguese, and Dutch had dominated maritime commerce; and as a

result of Cromwell’s policies and wars, “the losses this Nation

sustained thereby, [never] ever [are] again to be repaired.”121

Beginning with the success of “many Duch and Jews repairing

to Barbadoes [who] began the planting and making of sugar…[and]

the Duch being ingaged on the coast of Giney in Affrick for

negros slaves” in the 1640s,122 sugar plantations provided another

avenue to rapid financial recovery by the production of

commodities, increased shipping and foreign trade, and the growth

of manufacturing in England. Transportation of European servants

alone could never keep pace with the demand for labor. By the

1660s, the only way to maintain increased production on

120 Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth S. Rogoff, This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009): 70, 87-88.

121 Coke.122 Sir Robert Harley, “toucheing Barbados,” circa 1663. Quoted in

Elizabeth Donnan, Documents Illustrative of the Slave Trade, Volume I, 1441-1700 (New York: Octagon Books, 1965. Reprint of 1930 original.):125.

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plantations was with a “competent and a constant supply of Negro-

servants...”123

By the 1680s, the English economy was turning around, and

employment opportunities improved at home.124 Although penal

transportation to North America continued until the American

Revolution, kidnapping was reduced to insignificance and there

was little incentive for voluntary indentures. The end of one

forced mass migration had given rise to the substantial increase

of another; the slave population became almost entirely black,

which led to the ensuing linkage of color and slavery over the

course of the eighteenth century and beyond.

White servitude in the West Indies persisted on a limited

scale well into the nineteenth century when views on race and

class, such as Macaulay’s, had become more or less fixed in the

123 January 10, 1662/3 Letter of The Company of Royal Adventurers, Whitehall, to Francis Lord Willoughby, quoted in Donnan, 156.

124 Quoted in Donnan, 267: “Certain Considerations Relating to the RoyalAfrican Company, 1680. Secondly, The Publique Utility and Advantages of the Guiney Trade. For the Utility and Advantages that redound to the Nation by theGuiney Trade”: “The Exportation of our Native Woollen and other Manufactures in great abundance, most of which were imported formerly out of Holland; but have of late Years (by the present Companies Direction) been Manufactured at home: And for the greater expence thereof, have given express Orders to their Factors at Guiney to undersell all other Nations; whereby the wooll of this Nation is much more consumed and spent then formerly; and many Thousand of thepoor people imployed…”

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English mindset regarding servitude. A fascinating example is

provided in a letter to England from George Price, the owner of

Worthy Park Plantation in Jamaica, who wrote in 1843,

…the lowest class of Negro is certainly very low, but in no way

either in acts or words, lower than the lowest class ofEnglishmen,

and in many respects very much above it… the negro in temper

is very like the Irishman, and therefore very superior to the Englishman

in that respect.125

125 Michael Craton and James Walvin, A Jamaican Plantation: The History of Worthy Park, 1670-1970 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1970): 229. Worthy Park Plantation was founded by Francis Price, a soldier in Cromwell’s invasion forces, in the seventeenth century. See footnote 147 (below) for more details.George Price did not refer to nineteenth-century Englishmen of any class as Anglo-Saxons. The date of the letter is significant, since it follows emancipation. The comparison of three races (in Victorian thought) of servantsdoes not address the conditions of servitude, suggesting that even in the nineteenth century no distinction was warranted on the basis of class.

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4. Some Out-of-the-Way Corners in the Seventeenth Century

Precious little is known about the fates of Monmouth’s

rebels following the 1685 Bloody Assizes. The trials themselves

were discussed in considerable detail in law reviews and texts in

the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but until Macaulay’s

History no attention was paid to those who were sentenced.

Muddiman, whose Bloody Assizes of 1929 represents the only book that

contains the complete Judge’s Lists of November 12, 1685, was the

first to index and arrange the information; as he states in his

introduction, from the time the information was first printed in

1716, it did not appear again until the 1923 Calendar of State

Papers.126 Muddiman’s lists detail those executed or to be

executed; those who were transported, including several who

escaped custody in England or Barbados; those who were fined,

imprisoned, or whipped; those who were pardoned; those who were

in custody, bailed, or discharged, and a sizable number of those

still awaiting trial as of the date of the Lists’ publication; as

126 Muddiman, Preface to Bloody Assizes. Hotten did, however, provide partial lists.

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well as many who died in jail awaiting trial, sentencing, or

disposition.127

The distinguishing feature of Monmouth’s Rebellion was the

contention for access to political power of an emerging middle

class. This is best documented in a book by Peter Earle in which

he establishes that, contrary to traditional accounts, Monmouth’s

rebels were not “an army of peasants,” but were largely men “from

urban backgrounds… overwhelmingly concentrated in the middle

ranks of society. There were very few gentlemen and very few

labourers or paupers.”128 The rebels were drawn from a variety of

social groups who had little in common other than support for

Parliamentary government and intense dislike for repressive

policies of the monarchy and Church of England. For all the Whig

criticisms of James II and Judge Jeffreys, many historians have

overlooked the fact that only about a third of Monmouth’s rebels

actually faced trial. One contemporary account estimated that

“above seven thousand men ran away,”129 evading capture and

127 Ibid., 195-225.128 Peter Earle, Monmouth’s Rebels: The Road to Sedgemoor 1685 (NY: St. Martin’s

Press, 1977): 17.129 William Clarke, in Earle, 141. Earle, pp. 196-197, identifies the

most complete list of rebels as the “Monmouth Roll” in the British Library, which provides only 2,611 names.

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prosecution; of that number, many escaped to New England or the

European continent or remained in hiding in the countryside.130 Of

those ordered to be executed, Muddiman established that fewer

than 500 actually met that fate.131 There were numerous reprieves

and pardons, including some for money.132 Transportation for the

others was seen as a merciful reprieve, and was cheap, effective,

and profitable for the state, merchants, and planters. Of the

eight hundred or so ordered transported, many escaped or died

before departure; out of one hundred and fifteen prisoners

consigned to Sir William Howard at the Wells Assizes, at least

twenty five escaped in England before boarding ships.133 The

average mortality rate for a typical Atlantic crossing was

130 Earle, pg. 187, cites “a population listing of 1694” that shows “almost exactly half the Lyme rebels were still living in the town nine years after the rebellion, apparently none the worse for their experiences… Lyme Regis, in fact, seems to have got off rather lightly, as did many other towns and villages in the area of rebellion.”

131 Muddiman, 203, 231.132 Whigs focused on the 14,500 pounds that Prideaux, a “leader of the

Whig gentry” paid to Jeffreys for his freedom: Earle, 178. Earle asserts that others were able to bargain for their freedom at a price; such plunder was seen as spoils of war. Whether fined or transported, arrested rebels represented financial gain to the representatives of the State; the wealthy paid hefty fines, while those who were less affluent sacrificed what they could. This had been done on massive scales by Henry VIII with Church lands, and by Cromwell throughout his rule, as shown below. By comparison, James II’sassizes were almost insignificant in terms of numbers of convicts or amounts of confiscated property.

133 Muddiman, 203-218.

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between twenty and thirty percent, and the mortality for newly

arrived transports averaged thirty percent in the first year; of

the ninety convicts shipped aboard the “John Friggott of Bristoll”

on behalf of Sir William Booth, fourteen had died before

arrival.134 Only 306 of Monmouth’s rebels were certified to have

arrived for sale in Barbados as of January 1686.135 It is

virtually impossible to ascertain how many convicts survived to

see William III’s pardon of 1690, despite the strict

accountability over them legislated by the Barbados Assembly.136

Lieutenant-Governor Edwyn Stede provided depositions of two

prisoners, Randolph Babington and Daniel Manning, who arrived in

Barbados in two ships in January 1686 along with 239 convicted

134 Hotten, 317-341.135 Ibid. Macaulay cited Coad’s mortality figures for the latter’s

passage to Jamaica as one-fifth, or 22 out of 99 (see footnote 51 above). Roughly 100 were acquired by Jeaffreson for the Leeward Islands; Muddiman accounted for 2 sent to York, Virginia, and 55 to Carolina; of the remainder, according to Coad at least 200 probably wound up in Jamaica. Muddiman and others have claimed that nothing was known about the 98 convicts allotted to the Queen; however, at least 2 of them, William Woodcock (listed by Hotten) and Thomas Austin (in Pitman, below) were in Barbados.

136 Edward Steed, An Act for the governing and retaining within this Island all such Rebels convict as by his most sacred Majesties Order or Permit…, January 4, 1685. Reprinted in Pittman, 6-11. The degree of control over the rebels was extraordinary even byBarbadian standards. Every transaction involving sale or transfer, any movement, or death of Monmouth’s rebels was documented; failure by planters tocomply was punishable by imprisonment and/or steep fines. As noted elsewhere, Steed (spelling variable) was Lieutenant Governor.

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rebels.137 Stede had been charged by the Lords of Trade and

Plantations to establish whether “any supernumerary rebels had

been brought out here privately without being subject to the ten

years’ servitude….” and discovered the two. Babington claimed to

have been a London warehouse owner who was in Taunton on

business, and was merely a spectator when the Duke of Monmouth

passed through in July 1685. He was arrested for treason, pleaded

guilty, and was consigned to the merchant Sir William Booth for

transportation. Stede reported, “Having some money he stipulated

with Sir William for 28 [pounds] to go to Barbados as a free

passenger, and to stay there as a free resident during his term

of years, paying also the cost of his passage. On arrival he

remained for nine or ten days unmolested, until apprehended…”138

Babington was obviously banished, but it is not known for what

term; although he was listed in the Judges’ Lists for

transportation, his name did not appear among the prisoners’

137 Public Record Office, Calendar of State Papers, Colonial Series, America and West Indies, 1685-1688, 561 i-vi, ed. J. W. Fortescue, London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office (1899): 147-149. Hereafter CSPC.

138 CSPC, 148.

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lists shipped by Booth. While his fate is unknown, he was

probably sold into servitude.139

The case of Daniel Manning is interesting. He was a

blacksmith’s apprentice who

…shod the cattle and horses of the Duke of Monmouth’s army

on their arrival. He was impressed to join the rebel army as a

farrier, his master being willing that he should go. After two days

he escaped, and joined the King’s army…being ordered tostay

at Weston, with sixty more that had no arms.

When Manning’s unit was disbanded, he was given a pass by an

officer of the King, and returned to his master, who refused to

accept him “for fear of getting into trouble.” He went to London,

where he was “ill-treated,” forced to sign a four-year indenture,

and shipped to Barbados “as a white servant” along with “twenty-

two more, none of whom to his knowledge had been in the rebel

army.” Manning’s indenture had drawn Stede’s attention because it

was “not according to the appointed form, for want of which many

139 Charles I had passed an Act in 1642-43 stipulating mandatory terms of servitude for those arriving in the colonies “having no indentures or covenants.” PBS, “Original Documents,” The Slave Experience: Legal Rights & Government. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/experience/legal/docs1.html (Accessed Jan. 30,2011). The Act was significant in that it clearly showed that many servants were not indentured.

94

are sent to the Colonies against their wills and contrary to the

King’s orders.”140 Manning does not appear in either the Judges’

Lists or ships’ logs of prisoners. His case is useful to

illustrate the plight of apprenticeship labor in England: his

master had the power to commit him to military service against

his will, and was not bound to honor his employment obligation

when he returned.141 His fate is not known; however, his four-year

indenture was probably held binding, and as a blacksmith he had a

chance of not having to work as a common field hand. Stede’s

reference to “white servant” is noteworthy, since it suggests

that there were other types of servants and classes of laborers.

The kidnapping trade, or illegal smuggling and sale of English

people into forced servitude, was fully interwoven into the legal

trade by unscrupulous profiteers; included in the latter were not

140 CSPC, 148-149.141 Several recent scholars have argued that “slavery itself was not so

very different, in theory or in practice, from the compulsory apprenticeship of the young… the apprentice could only work for his master’s profit, he was unable to employ his own capital, he had to sleep in his master’s house, was unable to marry without leave, had to perform servile offices, and had to obeyand suffer correction, in return for food and clothing, and instruction in histrade.” 542-543. C.S.L. Davies, “Slavery and Protector Somerset: The Vagrancy Act of 1547.” The Economic History Review, New Series, Vol. 19, No. 3, 533-549 (1966): 542-43.

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only politicians, merchants, and ships’ captains, but numerous

ordinary citizens.

A third transport, Azariah Pinney, was a self-avowed Whig

rebel who was tried and convicted in Dorchester and consigned to

merchant Gerome Nipho for transportation.142 Pinney was a member

of a prosperous Presbyterian merchant family with interests in

the manufacture of Irish lace and trade in London. Despite his

conviction for treason, he was never forced into servitude; on

the contrary, he left extensive correspondence detailing his rise

to fame and fortune as a merchant and planter in the West Indian

colony of Nevis.143 Azariah Pinney’s name appears on “A Receipt

for one hundred Prisoners on Mr. Nepho’s Acct to be sent to

Barbudos” [sic] as being held in “Dorchester Goale [sic] to bee

Transported” on September 20, 1685.144 For reasons unknown,

however, Pinney was separated from this group and was “sent in

Custody to Bristoll to be transported” according to a letter

142 Muddiman, 214. Several alternate spellings of the name exist in different sources, e.g. Jerome, Neppho, etc. Nipho was the Queen’s secretary.

143 The story of the Pinney family is contained in Richard Pares, A West-India Fortune (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1950).

144 Hotten, 318-319.

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dated October 21st, 1685;145 both the receipt and the attached

letter were signed by George Penne, the man to whom Azariah’s

sister had paid sixty-five [pounds] for ransom money. Although

Pinney does not appear in James II’s General Pardon of March 10,

1686, he was granted “a pardon of his life and had a grant of his

goods and chattels” but was banished to the West Indies for ten

years. Pinney “sailed to the West Indies equipped with a Bible,

six gallons of sack and four of brandy for the voyage, and 15l.

[pounds] in his pocket.”146 Pinney remained free, though exiled

from England.

The other known memoirs written by rebels of the Bloody

Assizes are those of Henry Pitman, who escaped from Barbados;147

and John Coad, who substituted himself to serve another man’s

sentence.148 In the preface to Coad’s account the editors

acknowledge, “It might have perished by accident or gradual

decay, and its contents thus have been lost to the world, but for145 Ibid., 320. A note in Hotten’s list suggests that Pinney may have

provided evidence for the prosecution.146 Pares, 10.147 Henry Pitman, A Relation of the Great Sufferings and Strange Adventures of Henry

Pitman, Chyrurgion to the late Duke of Monmouth…, (London: Andrew Sowle, 1689). Early English Books Online (EEBO).

148 John Coad, A Memorandum of the Wonderful Providences of God to a poor unworthy Creature, during the time of the Duke of Monmouth’s Rebellion and to the Revolution in 1688 (London:Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1849). Early English Books Online (EEBO).

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the circumstance of its finding its way into the hands of Mr.

Macaulay who was pleased with its quaintness and truth.”149 There

is an earlier account of a German mercenary, Heinrich von

Uchteriz, who was captured in 1651 and sent to Barbados by

Cromwell. Von Uchteriz was freed after only four months when “it

was discovered that he was of German nobility. While he was

there, he ‘had to do the kind of work usually performed by the

slaves.’”150 To his story must be added an earlier narrative of

seventy-two men transported to Barbados by Cromwell in 1654151 who

returned to confront the very members of Parliament who had

profited from their unlawful transportation without trial; the

debate in Parliament upon their surprise reappearance in England

is supremely enlightening with regard to details of corruption

and the extent of the trade in white slavery at the highest

levels of society.

149 Ibid., vi.150 Jerome S. Handler, ed., “A German Indentured Servant in Barbados in

1652,” The Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society, XXXIII, 3 (May, 1970): 93. Von Uchteriz did not specify color of slaves.

151 Marcellus Rivers and Oxenbridge Foyle, England’s Slavery, or Barbados Merchandize; Represented In a Petition to the High and Honourable Court of Parliament…, (London, 1659). Early English Books Online (EEBO).

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According to Muddiman’s notes in the 1685 Judges’ Lists,

John Coad voluntarily substituted himself to serve the sentence

of another man, John Hacker.152 Coad did not appear in any of the

lists connected with the Assizes of Monmouth’s Rebels, although

Muddiman speculated that he may have been the same person as a

Thomas Coade who had been sentenced to execution.153 Neither

Thomas Coade nor John Coad’s names appear in any of Hotten’s

lists of convicted rebels. By his own account, Coad’s Memorandum

covers the period from June 12, 1685 to November 24, 1690. He

deserted his local royalist militia unit on June 16, 1685 and

joined the Duke of Monmouth’s forces near Axminster. He was

wounded in the wrist and chest at Philips Norton, and captured by

royalist forces. He claims to have languished “10 or 11 weekes”

at Ilchester prison, after which he was taken to the Wells

Assizes.154 Coad claims that he was there condemned to be hung,

drawn and quartered for desertion and rebellion; 155 Muddiman

provides a transcript of Lord Jeffrey’s warrant of September 26,

152 Muddiman, 209. The spelling is Muddiman’s.153 Ibid., 201.154 Coad, 5.155 Ibid.,, 12.

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1685, ordering the execution of one Thomas Coade at Wells.156 His

sister “attended” him while at Wells, where she told him

…there was an Officer come into the cloister to call out 200 men

for Jamaica she much pressed me to endeavour to get outamongst

them, she being much troubled that morning by an information that

she had, that my flesh was to be hung up before my dore…I…did

go with her to the Officer, and…offered him a fee to take me into

his list, which he refused, but told me that when he called a man that

did not answer, I might answer to his name and step in…a poor

woman of Charde, a stranger to me, who observed one of the company

unwilling to be transported, came after me and pulling me to the man,

he hastily shifted himself out of the string and put mein his place,

and told me if I was called, his name was Jo Haker.157

156Muddiman, 228. 157 Coad, 16-17. According to Muddiman, this “Jo Haker” was the “John

Hacker” Coade substituted himself for (Muddiman, 209), but John Hacker was sentenced at Taunton, not at Wells; there was however a “Jose Hawker” sentenced to transportation at Wells who “Escaped in England” (Muddiman, 210).Without knowing whether Muddiman had additional sources to confirm their identities, it is possible that “Jo Haker” may have been “Jose Hawker.” After all, Muddiman has assumed that Thomas Coade might be John Coad. All these permutations are mere possibilities, since the texts are rife with variants and misspellings.

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There are several aspects of Coad’s story that are implausible to

a modern reader; it seems too staged, and is laden with

propagandist rhetoric.

If Coad was, as he claims, a simple country carpenter, he

was a highly educated and literate carpenter, to the extent that

he was able to draft a formal petition to the governor of

Jamaica, and later to author a work that was part theological

discourse and part history, with carefully crafted elements of

political vindication and Puritan redemption through suffering in

the best traditions of Whig propaganda tracts and the romantic

genre of Barbary slaves (see above).158 Comments such as “the

bloody Popish Judge, the merciless monster Jefferies”159 and many

others suggest that the tale may have been heavily edited in the

1690s at the time of its initial publication; it seems less

likely to have been altered in 1849 when it appeared for

publication at the behest of Macaulay, who drew heavily on Coad’s

account for many details in his History of England. An important

feature of his work is that he referred only to white and black

158 According to Earle, ix-x: Dissenters were “a group for the most partliterate and particularly noted for their habit of writing diaries…”

159 Coad, 20.

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servants; the only references to bondage and slavery were in

biblical quotes.

Coad never provides the name of the ship on which he was

transported, which he says arrived at Port Royal, Jamaica on

November 24, 1685. He recounts the horrors of the Middle Passage

and the high mortality both at sea and upon arrival. Despite his

sufferings in his metaphorical Babylonian exile, Coad felt

fortunate to be purchased by a Puritan master, who stated his

intention to free him as soon as Coad could repay the cost of his

shipment and purchase.160 Coad was also given some “stock,” and

was allowed to “keep it and produce on the plantation” from which

he profited.161 We learn further that the plantation had six

160 Ibid., 35. It is important to remember that Jamaica was conquered and colonized by Roundhead forces under Cromwell’s Western Design, so that many of the freeholders and settlers on that island were nonconformists. One of the founding soldiers of the colony was Francis Price, who established a plantation dynasty in 1670. The history of the Price family is contained in Craton and Walvin, A Jamaican Plantation: The History of Worthy Park, 1670-1970. Price’s success was a rare exception: “Having sold their lands to their rather more affluent seniors, many disbanded soldiers either went off to serve as privateer crewmen, or fell to the status of wage-earners or indentured servants” (pg. 19). Craton and Walvin believe that Price may have joined Venable’s forces in Barbados or the Leeward islands, and may have been a servant himself (pg. 29). The authors have countered Whig historians’ officialtreatment of Cromwell’s Western Design strategy as “conscious policy and theory” by suggesting “the basis of the slave-owning plantocracy [was] sheer opportunism by a fortunate riff-raff” who “created a myth out of the right of conquest” (pg. 26) in Jamaica.

161 Coad, 42.

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servants, of which his “place was not the lowest;” three of the

servants, including Coad, acted as overseers for the first two

years of his servitude;162 in his third year, a new overseer was

hired and Coad’s duties included only carpentry, “sometimes in

our own plantation and sometimes hired out to others;” and in his

demoted position, he had to “submit” to “work with Negroes.” His

ability to travel and socialize was also curtailed, and he was

officially reprimanded for visiting friends.163 Coad apparently

tried to communicate with his absentee landlord in London, who

along with three other “great men had Plantations in our

neighbourhood…all of them nonconformists.”164 After four years’

servitude, Coad and unspecified others petitioned a Justice of

Peace for freedom on the grounds that they had fulfilled the

customary term of indenture; their “suit” was rejected because of

James II’s stipulation that they serve ten years. Coad noted that

162 Ibid., 44-45.163 Ibid., 94-95. Although Coad was now in the same social class with

blacks, he articulated a racial divide.164 Ibid., 98. As Zook pointed out, many wealthy Whigs were motivated

not only by ideological, but by economic considerations (Radical Whigs, 15). Coad never registered surprise or disappointment that nonconformists should purchase and employ other nonconformists; in fact, this seeming conflict is not addressed at all. Coad refers repeatedly to his oppressors as enemies, yethis landlord and owner was deemed a good Christian; this irony is highlighted by Coad’s self-identification with “Children of Israel under their Task-masters in Egypt” (Coad, 105).

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some of the servants in his group had been freed that “were too

bad servants to be kept, and we too serviceable to be freed,”

while other servants in Coad’s group had already died “in other

parts of the Iland.”165

An interesting feature of Coad’s narrative is his reference

to the terms of penal banishment: even if he were to outlive the

ten-year period of servitude, he could not return to England

“without a quietus, which is very unlikely will be granted.”166

Although servitude was temporary, banishment was for life. News

of William III’s January 1689/90 general pardon for transported

rebels reached the West Indies along with new governors for

Jamaica and Barbados. Coad and his contemporaries were shocked

when two rebels who promptly approached the governor for freedom

were “publickly whipt, and put in prison all night, and sent to

their service next morning.”167 He was aware that rebel servants

in Barbados had similarly been denied freedom.168 According to 165 Ibid., 100-101.166 Ibid., 123.167 Ibid., 129.168 The new Governor Kendall of Barbados protested the pardon in a

letter to the King of June 1690: “There has been great mortality among the white servants here, and by reason of the war [with France] the planters have been unable to supply themselves with white servants. For this reason I have not announced the repeal of the Act concerning the Monmouth rebels to the Council and Assembly. It seems that, when they arrived, the Lieutenant-

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Earle, the Barbadian Assembly reached a compromise with the King

that did not allow the rebel convicts to be freed “without the

royal permission.” King James’ sentence was not formally repealed

until March 1691; even then, “the attainder on the rebels had not

been lifted and their estates were still forfeit. How many of the

rebels survived this long and how many actually returned to

England we do not know.”169 Of the families the rebels left

behind, Earle recounts the fate of “the widow and daughter of

Philip Cox who were reported in 1687 begging for bread in the

streets.”170 Coad, together with “Gideon Dare, one of our men”171

and unspecified other rebels managed to obtain their freedom from

Governor [Stede] received positive orders from King James that their servitudeshould be fixed by Act at ten years. The planters accordingly bought them, andthinking themselves secure of them during that time taught them to be boilers,distillers and refiners, and neglected to teach any others as they would otherwise have done. If these men are freed, the loss to the planters will be great, and since we are at war and so thinly manned I think it would be a great kindness to the Island if the King ordered an Act to reduce their servitude to seven years. But if the King adhere to his original orders no injustice will be done to these rebels, for by law of the country if they comewithout indentures they must serve for five years, which period will expire next Christmas.” (Calendar of State Papers Colonial, America and the West Indies, January 1690, quoted in Earle, 181-182) Governor Kendall seemed to be under the impression that the convicts arrived without indentures; if they were not indentured servants, what kind of servants were they? This fact alone would support the idea that convicts were not, in fact, indentured servants.

169 Earle, 182.170 Ibid., 186.171 Muddiman, 220: Gideon Dare, sentenced at Taunton, had been “designed

for execution.”

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the governor, and left Jamaica in September 1690.172 An appendix

containing original manuscript pages was published in the 1849

edition, and contained a final epitaph to Coad’s story: after he

was freed he had appealed to his master for wages backdated to

what would have been the end of his four-year indenture in the

amount of thirty-six pounds and change; he received only the

customary ten pound freedom dues.173

The effect of Coad’s pardon had been to change his status

from convict slave to indentured servant.

Henry Pitman’s Relation of the Great Sufferings and Strange Adventures…

is quite different from Coad’s story; the only prayers in his

narrative were uttered from fear of death or shipwreck, or upon

deliverance from various evils. It is full of Crusoe-esque

shipwrecks and swashbuckling pirate adventures, and provides

fascinating descriptions of the actors’ lives in various

subcultures of the plantation complex and along the colonial

margins. Like Coad’s Jamaican tale, only a relatively small

portion of Pitman’s Relation actually deals with his captivity and

servitude in Barbados.172 Coad, 134.173 Coad appendix, 13.

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Pitman was a surgeon who, having recently returned from “a

Voyage to Italy,” happened to be visiting relatives in the area

of Monmouth’s landing; he rode with his brother “and some other

friends” to see the Duke’s army out of curiosity. When he had

seen enough, he was unable to return home because of troop

presences, and was prevailed upon “to stay and take care of the

sick and wounded men,” insofar as he could not leave anyway, and

felt obligated to do so by his sense of Christianity and the

“Duty of my Calling.”174 Pitman and his brother were arrested,

convicted, and consigned to Jerome Nipho for sale and

transportation to Barbados. George Penne, the merchant who

purchased them in England, sought to negotiate with his family

for sixty pounds (sterling), in exchange for which the brothers

would be granted freedom in Barbados and serve only a “titular

master.” Penne made it clear to the Pitmans that the merchants

were able to determine the conditions of sale and labor, or

“rigor and severity,” in Barbados. This was, according to Pitman,

“the buying and selling of Free-men into slavery.”175

174 Pitman, 1.175 Ibid., 4-5.

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After a miserable Atlantic crossing in the Betty of London

during which nine fellow transports died, the Pitman brothers’

terms of notional servitude were initially ignored by the

merchant company of Charles Thomas who, according to Hotten’s

Lists, sold them to a master named Robert Bishop.176 Bishop hired

the doctor’s services out, and pocketed his fees. Pitman

protested,

…I had the confidence to tell him, That I would no longer

serve him, nor any other as a Surgeon, unless I were entertained

according to the Just Merits of my Profession and Practice, and

that I would chuse rather to work in the Field with theNegroes,

than to dishonour my Profession by serving him as a Physitian and

Surgeon, and to accept of the same entertainment as common

Servants. My angry Master at this was greatly enraged, and the

fiery Zeal of his immoderate Passion was so heightned by some

lying Stories of a fellow Servant, that he could not content himself

with the bare execution of his Cane on my Head, Arms and Back,

…until he had split him in pieces, but he also confinedme close

Prisoner in the Stocks, which stood in a open place, exposed to the

176 Hotten, 325.

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Scorching heat of the Sun, where I remained about twelve Hours,

until my Mistriss, moved either with Pitty or Shame, gave order for

my release.

Pitman and his brother continued to serve Bishop under similar

conditions for some fifteen months more, until the latter became

too indebted to retain their service. The Pitmans, it turns out,

were part of a business agreement not mentioned in other cases.

Bishop had in effect rented them from Thomas and when he could no

longer pay to keep them, he was forced to return them, whereupon

“the Merchants were forced to remit the Money due for our

Service.” Apparently, as long as Pitman earned money as a doctor,

both Bishop and Thomas profited. The money remitted to Bishop may

have been a refunded security bond, a guarantee for which he was

no longer liable since the merchants, and not the master, had

terminated the agreement. There were various types of such bonds

posted by different parties in the convict trade.

Pitman and his brother remained in the custody of the

merchants “as Goods unsold,” during which time William Pitman

died. Evidently Thomas had at least partially honored some terms

of Penne’s bartered original conditions of sale, since Henry

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Pitman “would not consent to be disposed of their pleasure;” that

is, he somehow had gained a say as to whom he would serve. For

his recalcitrance, Pitman was threatened with horse-whipping and

“Servile Imployment.”177 It was at this point that Pitman, using

money he had received surreptitiously from relatives and friends,

paid a poor free white man, John Nuthall, to purchase a small

boat from a free black “Guiney Man.” In exchange for his

services, Nuthall would receive free passage and could keep the

boat at their final destination. Nuthall extorted more money from

Pitman to cover his debts, under threat of exposing the plan;

Pitman had no choice but to pay. Pitman had by this time

recruited two fellow rebel transports, Thomas Austin and John

Whicker, who also provided what spare money they could.178 In

addition to the boat, Pitman managed to assemble an impressive

supply list for the voyage, including

…A hundred weight of Bread, a convenient quantity of Cheese,

a Cask of Water, some few Bottles of Canary, Madera Wine, and

Beer: these for the support of Nature; and then for Life, a Compass,

177 Pitman, 12.178 Ibid., 13.

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Quadrant, Chart, half Hour-Glass, half Minute-Glass, Log and Line,

large Tarpaulin, a Hatchet, Hammer, Saw and Nailes, some spare

Boards, a Lanthorn and Candles…179

Pitman had paid blacks with silver “pieces of eight” to assist

him with storing and loading supplies; he did not mention whether

or not they were free. When threatened with discovery at the

point of departure, Pitman and his team considered “whither to

retire in the Country to lie dormant if possible” as runaways,

but they escaped detection. That done, Pitman and five of

Monmouth’s Rebels, together with two others, set out under cover

of night for the Dutch island of Curacao.180

The remainder of the story is part Shakespeare (The Tempest),

part Defoe, and part R. L. Stevenson. Only a few details

pertinent to this thesis are provided.

179 Ibid., 14. They also had a blunderbuss and a musket, but forgot their ammunition ashore (p. 19); Pitman carried tincture of opium in his medical supplies, which he used for sedation and treatment of diarrhea (p. 23).

180 Ibid., 15. Pitman’s rebel crew included rebels John Whicker, Peter Bagwell, William Woodcock, John Cooke, and Jeremiah Atkins; Thomas Austin bowed out from fear of death at sea. They were accompanied by two poor whites,John Nuthall and Thomas Waker, for whom no information is provided, other thanthat they were debtors (p. 19). Whicker, Cooke, and Bagwell had sailed to Barbados in the Betty with the Pitman brothers (Hotten).

111

Pitman’s team was marooned on a small island, where they

encountered other self-avowed English “rebels” who had

escaped naval service and turned to piracy. When Pitman

and his team refused to join them, the pirates burned

their boat, took most of their supplies and left them

stranded; before they left, Pitman “gave the Privateers

30 pieces of Eight for the Indian they took on the Main

but was not so true to their promise as to let him at

liberty (which I expected would be serviceable unto us in

catching Fish &s).”181 Four of the privateers remained

with Pitman’s group. Pitman whiled away his time there,

“sometimes Reading or Writing, and at other times went

abroad with my Indian a Fishing…”182

After some three months, Pitman was taken aboard a

visiting privateer man of war; his erstwhile companions

were left behind. He visited Puerto Rico and Hispaniola

before his adoptive crew fell in with a ketch out of New

York bound for the small island of Providence, on which

181 Ibid., 21. Despite having recently escaped forced servitude, Pitman had no qualms about buying an Indian slave.

182 Ibid., 24.

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an eight month-old commune of religious refugees “from

Jamaica and other parts” lived “under the protection of

no Prince.” Several of the privateers decided to remain

there “and betake themselves to honest course of Life.”183

Pitman and the privateers next set sail for Carolina to

load provisions before sailing on to New York. While

there, Pitman met an acquaintance from Barbados who told

him that the escapees had been given up for dead only

after extended searches in the surrounding islands.

Pitman boarded a ship bound for Amsterdam under a false

name, disembarked at the Isle of Wight, and returned home

in disguise, where he was “joyfully received as one risen

from the Dead.” Unbeknownst to him, his relations had

procured his pardon before this time. Pitman’s tale was

dated June 10, 1689.184

The rebels Pitman left behind also had their share of

adventures. Nuthall and Waker, the two debtors, attempted to make

183 Ibid., 29. It is not known how many other such communities may have sprung up throughout the region. Pitman did not mention what became of his slave after he left the island.

184 Ibid., 31. The pardon would have pre-dated William III’s general pardon, but was probably obtained after the Dutch invasion of 1688.

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their way off the island in a small craft, and were never heard

from again. The remaining rebels encountered a small privateer

with eight Englishmen and a black slave, “very ill principled and

loose kind of Fellows,” who had attempted to round the tip of

South America and failed; Whicker and the others took their boat

and left them stranded on the island. Setting sail for New

England, they were overtaken by Spaniards out of Santiago, Cuba,

who enslaved them

to pump Ship, wash their Clothes, and beat Corn in great wooden

Morters, and Negroes with naked Swords, always standingby as

Overseers… When at home, our business was to…fetch water, which

we were forced to carry upon our naked Backs…sometimes into the

Woods to cut Wood, bare-footed and bare-leged…185

The men were later split up in two ships, during which time

Atkins died and was jettisoned at sea. When news reached the

Spanish governor of Cuba that the Duke of Albemarle had arrived

at Jamaica, the English prisoners were freed and went to Jamaica,

where they “endeavoured in the best manner…to get passage for

England.”186 No time frame was provided for their return, but they185 Ibid., 37.186 Ibid., 38.

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must have reached Jamaica after 1688 and received pardons, since

they evidently evaded the customary servitude that awaited

arrivals without indentures.

Of the eleven Monmouth Rebels whose accounts have been

examined, seven are reported to have returned to England. While

eleven is hardly a representative sample of eight hundred, these

sole known accounts provide a wealth of information regarding the

complexity of West Indian penal servitude: for the right amount

of money, Pinney remained free, but banished; Coad worked as an

overseer with privileges, and as a common laborer with blacks;

Pitman had access to money, refused to consort with “common

servants” and blacks, and even in servitude demanded recognition

of his social status as a physician by refusing to work even

under the threat of violence and field labor; Austin chose to

remain in servitude rather than risk death at sea; Bagwell,

Cooke, Whicker and Woodcock were enslaved by their Spanish

captors and worked under black overseers; and two, Atkins and

William Pitman, died. We learn also that many other rebels had

died en route, upon arrival, or in the islands, and unspecified

others returned to England. Some may have turned to piracy and

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privateering among the countless other debtors, convicts, and

impressed seamen who had escaped servitude; some of them sought

riches, while others sought only the security and independence of

a tolerant society. Some, probably most, of their families were

reduced to abject poverty in their absence, as the estates of

convicts were automatically forfeited.

Despite the differences in their experiences, there were key

similarities: these rebels were native Englishmen, not Irish,

Scottish, Welsh, European, Indian, or African. At least several

of them were literate, urban professionals and skilled craftsmen.

They shared political and religious views, and they felt their

status as Monmouth’s Rebels distinguished them from other

convicts. They were tried in accordance with long-established

English law and convicted of treason; they were not voluntary

indentured servants, nor were they kidnapped. They were consigned

by the state to merchants, in whose hands lay their lives and

fates. They considered themselves above common servants and

slaves, without regard for race or color; there was neither

criticism, sympathy, nor any discussion whatever of the forced

labor of other servants or slaves. Although they clearly saw

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themselves as victims, they did not convey any sense that their

fellow servants and slaves had been similarly victimized.

Monmouth’s rebels were remarkably like thousands of convicts

transported by Cromwell, and shared similar attitudes about their

fates. They did not, however, share political or religious views.

No one knows exactly how many Cavaliers, Tories, Anglicans and

Catholics Cromwell sent to the West Indies; even less well known

is how many of his former supporters and non-partisan civilians

were transported. Under Cromwell, transportation was like a

state-owned corporate enterprise that rid England, Scotland,

Ireland, and Wales of any political opponents or social

undesirables, and redistributed their property and wealth among

his supporters. The spiriting, or kidnapping, of people for

transportation expanded dramatically during his rule, causing a

public outcry. In response, the government made sporadic, half-

hearted attempts to curtail the practice, but with little or no

effect.187 This was due primarily to the fact that politicians, 187 Even soldiers were kidnapped. In a single ship, the Conquer of

London, inspected in August of 1657, eleven of twenty-six transports had been spirited. In addition to a soldier, victims included a Spaniard, a Dutchman, and a woman who was herself sold by a soldier. Nearly all of the victims, bothmen and women, were aged 17 to 30, and had gone to London in search of work. In Peter Wilson Coldham, The Complete Book of Emigrants, 1607-1660 (Baltimore, MD: Genealogical Publishing Co., 1987): 353. Coldham provides detailed data based

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from city aldermen to mayors and sheriffs, and even Members of

Parliament were inextricably involved in the trade. There was

simply too much money to be made.

Available records attest to the widespread abuse of the

system, which under Cromwell was a free-for-all: no one was safe.

Cromwell elevated penal transportation and enslavement to a new

level, in which a quasi-totalitarian state, part martial law and

part police state, insatiably devoured thousands of people each

year, arguably forming an early prototype of a concentration

camp. This is an important comparison, because for these and

other convicts, plantations were in effect prisons. Imprisonment

at home was a financial burden, and prisoners in jail were of

little use to the state. Cromwell issued warrants to his military

subordinates empowering them, in broad terms, to arrest and

imprison anyone they saw as a threat;188 in turn, he commissioned

on all available public records, building on the work of Hotten a century earlier.

188 In a letter of April 6, 1654, Cromwell authorized General Monck, commander of forces in Scotland, to “transport to foreign English plantations such of the enemies now in arms in the Highlands as shall be in your power, when and how you choose.” In Abbot, Crane, and Gleason: 246-7. There was no trial for the victims.

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specific merchants to liquidate their property and transport them

to the plantations.189

The Cromwellian system was in full swing during an uprising

in 1654, when Marcellus Rivers, Oxenbridge Foyle, and seventy

others who “never saw Salisbury, or bore arms in their lives…were

pickt up, as they travelled upon their lawfull occasions.”190

Although they were never indicted, tried, or convicted, they were

kept imprisoned for a full year, and without warning were

assembled and marched aboard a ship bound for Barbados, where

they arrived May 7, 1656. Following a middle passage under armed

guard, sleeping among horses, the ship’s captain sold the

prisoners as

the goods and chattels of Martin Noel, and Major ThomasAlderne

189 Ibid., 332: In a letter of 16 June 1654, Cromwell gave Martin Noell,a merchant, planter, and specialist trader in servants, authorization for “…drawing, perfecting and registering of all and singular grants, bargains, sales, indentures or writings indented and conveyances whatsoever of whatsoever mannors, lands, tenements, hereditaments, goods or chattels which by the said judges or commissioners shall happen at any time hereafter to be made by virtue and in pursuance of the said ordinance [for relief of creditorsand poor persons] or any other act or ordinance to be hereafter made as aforesaid…together with such wages, fees, rewards and emoluments as are or shall be incident or belonging to the said offices…” This was a license to steal, which Noell and many others did often, profiting immensely by the sale of prisoners and their property, ably supplied by Cromwell’s military and law enforcement officers.

190 Rivers and Foyle, England’s Slavery…: 3.

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of London, and Captain Henry Hatsell of Plymouth, neither sparing the aged of threescore and sixteen years old; nor Divines, nor Officers, nor Gentlemen, nor any age or condition of men, but rendred all alike in thismost insupportable Captivity, they now generally grinding at the Millsattending the Fornaces, or digging in this scorching Island…being boughtand sold still from one Planter to another, or attachedas horses and beastsfor the debts of their masters, being whipt at their whipping posts, as Rogues, for their masters pleasure, and sleep in styes worse then hogs inEngland, and many other wayes made miserable, beyond expression orChristian imagination.191

Rivers and Foyle’s petition included four letters from other

members of their group, all of whom had received the same

treatment under similar circumstances. All of the men named Noel

and Hatsell, who were sitting Members of Parliament when the

petition was delivered on March 24, 1658/9. 192 The petitioners

did not provide an account of how they had escaped servitude and

returned to England, and did not specify exactly how many of the 191 Ibid., 5.192 John Towill Rutt, ed., Diary of Thomas Burton, Esq., Member in the Parliaments of

Oliver and Richard Cromwell, from 1656 to 1659, Vol. IV (London: Henry Colburn, 1828): 253. A separate petition was filed at the same time by a Rowland Thomas, who had been confined to the Tower by Secretary of State Thurloe, and also sold into slavery by Noell, together with four others (Colonel Gardiner, Somerset and Frauncis Fox, and Thomas Saunders). Two men who were to be shipped with them were sick and so were not shipped, and were later pardoned.

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group of seventy-two remained in Barbados. All of the men had

originally been taken into custody by Major-generals.

There was considerable embarrassment caused by the

petitions, which were debated on and off from March 25 until

April 12, 1659. The first reaction by Parliament was denial that

any wrong had been committed, followed by attempts to prevent

further debate on the subject. Martin Noell’s response on the

first day provided the standard image of a voluntary indentured

servant:

I trade into those parts. Merchants send to me to procure such

artificers to be sent over as I might think fit for them. I have had

several persons out of Bridewell and other prisons, that I have

sent over, and I had to do in sending those; but I had only the

recommending of them to that Mr. Chamberlain. I abhor the thoughts

of setting 100l. [pounds of sugar] upon any man’s person. It is false

and scandalous. I indent with all persons that I send over. Indeed, the

work is hard, but none are sent without their consent. They were

civilly used, and had horses to ride on. They serve most commonly

five years, and then have the yearly salary of the island. They have

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four times of refreshing, and work but from six to six:so it is not

so hard as is represented to you; not so much as the common husband-

man here. The work is mostly carried on by the Negroes.It is a place as

grateful to you for trade as any part of the world.193

The first grounds for not hearing the complaints were raised

by the Serjeant (sic), who claimed that it should be dismissed,

first because it was a Cavalier’s petition, and second because

judging a Member of Parliament was a breach of privilege.

Thurloe, Cromwell’s Secretary of State, and the other named

members were incensed at being charged with crimes, but were even

angrier that Rivers and his fellow petitioners had been granted

Parliamentary protection. Thurloe wanted the petitioners locked

up, on the grounds that the petitions had “almost set the nation

in a flame.”194 Hatsell, one of the accused members, chimed in

with Noell:

I was present at Plymouth when these persons were shipped.

I never saw any go with more cheerfulness. There were two old

men and a minister. The minister had heard my name. He acquainted me that he had no desire to go. I took upon

me to 193 Sir Martin Noell, Mar. 25, 1659, in Burton’s Diary (Rutt, 258-59).194 Secretary James Thurloe, in Rutt, 261.

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release him, and another that had no will to go. They went home

to their own houses. I gave bills of exchange for 4l. 10s. a man for

their passing over. The master of the ship told me thatRivers feigned

himself mad, and he was much troubled with him, and told him that if

he could make friends when he came over, to get so muchas his

passage cost, he might be released.195

Some members clamored for the petitioners to be locked up in the

Tower, because the petition would “endanger all that have ever

faithfully served,” a reference to supporters of Cromwell, not

penal or indentured servitude. But others disagreed, protesting

abuses of justice and fundamental rights; Sir Henry Vane warned

that the same fate could await the current Members of Parliament

“whenever the tables turn.”196 A Major Beake agreed, since

“Slavery is slavery, as well in a Commonwealth as under another

form;” while a Captain Baynes said,

I have had too great a zeal against Cavaliers, till I saw how that

which was against law was turned upon our friends. If they deserve

hanging or imprisonment, let them have it. It is put upon that issue,

195 Captain Hatsell, in Rutt, 262.196 Ibid.

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that they went with their consent, so a man may be sentto the galleys,

or any place of banishment. However, if they be sent against law,

I would have it referred to a Committee to examine it thoroughly.”197

This was a case, according to another member, of buying and

selling men. Still another member moved to reject the petition,

and asked, “What will you do with the Scots taken at Dunbar, and

at Durham and Worcester? Many of them were sent to Barbadoes.

Will you hear all their petitions?”198

As the debate continued, the petitioners were likened, as

Cavaliers, to rebels who ought to be tried as treasonous

prisoners of war, except, as was pointed out, the war had been

over for years. Others felt that it was enough that the

petitioners were still alive, and that the matter should be

dropped, on the grounds that extraordinary times now past had

demanded extraordinary measures. Lord Lambert demanded an

197 Rutt, 264-65. Under Baynes’ reading of the law, penal exile to hard labor required the consent of the person following a trial as a reprieve from execution. The legitimacy of Rivers’ case was due not to his enslavement, but to the fact that he had been enslaved without trial.

198 Major Knight, in Rutt, 270.

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investigation into “perpetual imprisonment. This is worse than

death.”199

By April 12, Parliament was stalemated on the issue. Rather

than allow some of its leading members to stand trial and face

conviction for acting illegally, the decision was reached to

leave the decision to Richard Cromwell, whose absolute authority

went above Parliamentary law. Although nothing further was heard

on this particular case, an impeachment hearing was begun in the

case of Major-General Boteler for “entry and detainer of the

lands and goods, by force, and rescuing the goods from the

sheriff, and hindering execution, and taking the goods which were

distrained, and seizing money…and imprisonment.”200 Boteler was

only prosecuted because he had attempted to extort and rob Lord

Falkland. Countless others of lesser social standing and means

had been similarly stripped of their possessions on trumped up

charges, and imprisoned and transported without trial. The

attorney-general asked for “as high a punishment as any, save

199 Rutt, 303. The reference to perpetual imprisonment, associated with men bought and sold, needs no elaboration.

200 Ibid., 406.

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death,” and added that death was not the highest punishment:

“Sending one to Jamaica or Barbadoes, is much more.”201

The next day, on April 13, Sir Martin Noell, the servant

trader, planter, merchant, Member of Parliament, and tax

collector, was prosecuted by Parliament for failure to turn in

excise taxes that he was responsible for collecting in the amount

of 25,207 pounds sterling. The case was put aside with assurances

from a Member that Noell would make full restitution: “There is

no doubt as to Mr. Noell’s money. He has it ready.”202

As was the case with Monmouth’s Rebels, several surviving

accounts of Cromwell’s transports were written by literate

English gentlemen. Like Monmouth’s Rebels, the English transports

made no mention of other servants that were not in their group.

Their tales suggest that they were indeed employed in slave

labor, the conditions of which were fully understood and

believed, as well as intentionally obscured, by many English

political and merchant elites. The efforts of Noell and others to

whitewash the nature of their servitude are instructive:

201 Ibid. Many members of Parliament were not taken in by Noell’s description of servant life in Barbados.

202 Ibid., 416-420.

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legitimate voluntary indentures were common, but other classes of

servants such as convicts and victims of political and religious

persecution, as well as kidnapped victims were not afforded the

same terms of service. The merchants and politicians who engaged

in the illicit trade knew only too well that what they were doing

was illegal.

There is no way to know how many were transported in this

manner during the interregnum, but some estimates suggest that

ten thousand a year was a conservative figure in the 1650s. As

A.E. Smith wrote, “No mention of such shipments would be likely

to appear in the State Papers, and no record of them is likely to

be discovered elsewhere…It is only in those cases of a merchant

or captain who petitioned the government for special license…that

any information remains.”203

203 Smith, Colonists in Bondage…:164-65.

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5. Renaming Mongrels

“…the merchant class [was] the chief element in the determination

of a commercial and colonial policy…it had been equallyinsistent

on the extension of British power in Asia, Africa, and America, as

well as in the Baltic and the Mediterranean. It was at this time and in

these hands that England began to turn definitely from its position

as an island chiefly agricultural to a world-power chiefly industrial

and commercial.”204

The West Indies Plantation Complex can be likened to a

virtual petri dish in a very unscientific laboratory, where human

laborers served as subjects in economic experiments that were not

considered cruel by profit-seeking investors. Seventeenth-century

English concepts of coercive labor, based on time-honored feudal

serfdom and villeinage, were derived from elaborate, well-

established social class stratification schemes in which wealth

and property conveyed power that was often enforced with

violence. Political convicts, criminals, and prisoners of war

were viewed as captives who served economic necessity and/or

justice under various power elites. Captives were banished by the

204 Abbott, Crane and Gleason: 188.

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state and forced to render service to state surrogates, corporate

entities, or private individuals, whereby a form of personal

redemption and social utility for the captives was envisioned in

a precursor to the modern prison camp. Although different in

theory, voluntary migrant labor was, for many, forced labor in

practice on the plantations. Kidnapping of others by any means

established a lucrative black market serving labor-hungry

planters and the merchants who supplied them. The illegal

practice was long overlooked by politicians because it provided a

remedy for overpopulation and accompanying chronic severe

unemployment and high crime levels. As captives, many kidnap

victims also became forced laborers.

Whether as convicts or prisoners, voluntary migrants, or

kidnap victims, seventeenth-century laborers were referred to as

servants, bond-servants, slaves, and bond-slaves, terms which

were used indiscriminately: any unfree member of the laboring

class was technically and legally referred to as a servant, and

at the lowest social strata was viewed and referred to as a slave

by virtue of the harsh treatment and working conditions accorded

to any other beast of burden. The word slave was not, as some

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have suggested, merely a derogatory term, but was used to

describe actual conditions and usage of servants, regardless of

technical status. Throughout feudal European history, native

servants were distinguished from foreign servants; the latter

were commonly referred to as slaves. Slavery as a form of

servitude was a part of the natural order of things in the

collective English mentality of the seventeenth century, as

described in treatises from Raleigh to Locke. Although class

structure in England was rigid, significant gradations in

categories of servitude were loosely defined and interpreted in

the colonies according to the needs of employers.

Similar conditions existed in Spanish, French, and Dutch

colonies: servants, including slaves, were sold and traded

between colonies of different nations. The conditions of

servitude for convicts and prisoners frequently entailed slave

labor; this was intentional, as stated in a short-lived law of

Edward VI, and later in Acts of James I. Penal labor on a

plantation was no different than rowing in a galley. For most, it

was merely a deferred death sentence. On plantations, voluntary

migrants and kidnap victims often received the same treatment as

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prisoners, and were all lumped together in a chattel servant

class under proprietary masters.

There were free and enslaved Africans in England as early as

the reign of Henry VIII. When the demand for plantation servants

could not be met solely by transportation of European subjects or

indigenous Americans, the Dutch Atlantic trade in African slaves

provided a ready supply that was at once reliable and highly

profitable. The African slave trade, established by Africans,

found a lucrative new market among European colonists. The

conditions under which Africans enslaved their countrymen did not

differ much from those by which Englishmen enslaved their own, as

described by a French traveler in 1682:

Those sold by the Blacks are for the most part prisoners of war,

taken either in fight, or pursuit, or in the incursionsthey make into

their enemies’ territories; others stolen away by theirown countrymen;

and some there are, who will sell their own children, kindred, or

neighbours. This has often been seen, and to compass it, they desire

the person they intend to sell, to help them in carrying something to

the factory by way of trade, and when there, the personso deluded…

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is sold and deliver’d up as a slave, notwithstanding all his resistance,

and exclaiming against the treachery…The kings are so absolute, that upon any slight

pretence ofoffences committed by their subjects, they order them

to be sold for slaves, without regard to rank, or possession…

In times of dearth and famine, abundance of those people

will sell themselves, for a maintenance, and to preventstarving…

In the year 1682, I could get but very few, because there was

at that time almost a general peace among the blacks along the coast…

The trade of slaves is in a more peculiar manner the business

of kings, rich men, and prime merchants, exclusive of the inferior sort…

The slaves we purchase there, are either prisonersof war, or

given them as contributions…and some also that have been judicially

condemned for crimes committed, to perpetual slavery: besides, a very

few sold to us by their own kindred, or parents…205

Cultural differences notwithstanding, no honest English

politician, merchant, or planter would have so much as raised an

eyebrow at African methods of enslavement, except perhaps to

205 “John Barbot’s Description of Guinea, 1678-1682,” quoted in Donnan, 284-298. It is interesting, although perhaps of marginal significance, to notethat there was a decline in the availability of African slaves at roughly the same time as there was a decline in the supply of English transports, althoughfor different reasons. Barbot illustrates the established European colonial dependence on African labor by 1682.

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register surprise at the similarities of their respective social,

political, and economic methods. Barbot’s narrative may as well

have been about conquest in Ireland or Scotland; religious or

political persecution among Cavaliers and Roundheads or

Protestant sects and Catholics; kidnapping in urban migration

centers such as Bristol and London; voluntary migration because

of financial hardship or improved opportunity for social

mobility; or punishment of criminals. To a seventeenth-century

English merchant, the purchase of African enslaved servants must

have seemed a perfectly familiar, natural and welcome supplement

to meet the demand for colonial labor.

Coercive labor was a category that transcended issues of

color and race; in both Africa and Europe, labor was simply a

social class and economic resource whose employment was the

prerogative of the wealthy and powerful. From a general

comparative perspective, early Atlantic slavery bore universal

economic hallmarks that have characterized slavery throughout

human history right up to the present day. It was not a uniquely

English, or even European concept; both slavery and racism have

deep roots in the human experience. Slavery was, however, an

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essential component of the plantation system. There was simply no

way that a small farmer in the seventeenth century could

profitably grow labor-intensive commodity crops and produce sugar

in the West Indies, tobacco in Virginia and Maryland, or rice in

South Carolina. Plantation slavery was, as Elsa Goveia

summarized, “essentially an economic expedient”206 that was not

limited to white masters. Among large numbers of free black slave

owners in eighteenth-century South Carolina, slavery was a

“commercial venture” in which “free black masters embraced many

of the attitudes of the white community while remaining on the

fringe of [white] society” as late as 1862.207 In the later days

of southern U.S. slavery, racial distinctions were slowly

becoming blurred in some areas among small groups of free blacks

who had achieved wealth and elevated social status and joined the

206 Elsa V. Goveia, Slave Society in the British Leeward Islands at the End of the EighteenthCentury (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1965): 104.

207 Larry Koger, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790-1860 (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1995): 3. Koger disputes the traditional view, referred to as Woodson’s Thesis, that free blacks purchased relatives and friends solely in order to enable a notional freedom. He provides exhaustive archival data which detail census data, tax records, and deeds of sale and transfer of black slaves. Female free blacks in small service industries were the owners of slaves in primarily urban areas, while male free black slaveowners were concentrated on rural farms and small plantations. Koger also cites cases of mulatto families who were legally declared white. Koger does not provide any information on white servants.

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class of social elites. This change may be seen as an example of

what Macaulay had referred to as “moral and political

amalgamation” (above), to which economic considerations must be

added.

England, like other nations before and since, formed its own

cultural adaptations of slavery. Issues of race, color, class,

religion, morality, and others framed social relations at home

and abroad. During the late Tudor and early Stuart reigns, the

English made social distinctions between native and foreign

servants, but not economic distinctions. Racial thought was a

highly subjective, politically motivated rationale for social

control regardless of color. African and British servants served

in England, although the earliest Africans tended to be prized as

exotic status symbols of the wealthy,208 whereas many whites were

208 William Shakespeare’s Sonnets are not the only evidence that Englishmen valued African women. Ligon, pp. 15-16, described “many pretty young Negro Virgins” with “a beauty no Painter can express, and therefore my pen may well be silent…Wanton, as the soyl that bred them, sweet as the fruitsthey fed on…Nature could not, without help of Art, frame such accomplish’d beauties, not only of colours, and favour, but of motion too, which is the highest part of beauty.” Ligon also commented on the intelligence and sensibility of blacks he met; the employment of servile and manumitted blacks in supervisory and management positions on plantations belies the traditional belief that all blacks were viewed by whites as savages or brutish animals. This was a view that was maintained throughout the eighteenth century to justify the continued slave trade when the Caribbean colonies were eclipsed byBritish East Indian competitors; see Goveia, 23-25.

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primarily agricultural peasants. England displayed universal

social hallmarks of racial thought also common throughout human

history: when the going got rough, fingers were always pointed at

foreigners first. In response to acute economic crises during the

reign of Elizabeth I, the Queen ordered the deportation of Irish

from England in 1594, followed by the deportation of “Negroes” in

1596 and again in 1601. The 1596 Act of Privy Council referred

specifically to slaves, whereas the 1601 proclamation was applied

to blacks and moors in general. The 1596 Act was intended to

gather slaves to be exchanged for English prisoners of Spain and

Portugal; the owners of the slaves, at least initially, were

reluctant to comply with the order. By 1601, there were

apparently sufficient numbers of free poor blacks in England to

constitute a burden on poverty relief services.209 Abbot Emerson 209 Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin, eds., Tudor Royal Proclamations, Volume

III, The Later Tudors (1588-1603) (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1969). The most frequently recurring topics of proclamations during Elizabeth’s reign included price and wage controls; regulation and restriction of imported and exported goods; manufacturing standards; currency manipulation; and attempted remedies for chronic high unemployment and crime levels. The “Deportation of Irishmen” was ordered February 21, 1594; householders, menial servants of nobles, and some students were exempted (pp. 134-5). The deportation of blackswas ordered March 18, 1600/1601, “for the good and welfare of her own natural subjects…who are fostered and powered here, to the great annoyance of her own liege people that which [covet] the relief which these people consume, as alsofor that the most of them are infidels…” (p. 221-2) The latter order included “Blackamoors”, an indeterminate label used to describe most Muslims and lighter skinned Africans.

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Smith cites a “remarkable case of a Negro named Benjamin Lewis,”

who was an English voluntary indentured servant in Virginia in

1691.210

The English black community referred to in the Tudor

proclamations obviously included free men and women, since the

care of slaves and servants was the responsibility of their

owners. The coexistence of free blacks with white servants in

conditions of bond servitude that included slavery has been

traced throughout the colonial period elsewhere in this paper:

color and class were not always inextricably linked, as

demonstrated by the emancipation of black slaves nearly a century

before the independence of Ireland. Another prominent example of

the disjuncture between the traditional color and class model was

observed in Barbados by the end of the seventeenth century, when

poor free whites were becoming socially and commercially

displaced by free blacks and slaves.211 The un- and underemployed

poorer whites who could not afford to emigrate came to occupy a 210 Smith, Colonists in Bondage…: 243-44.211 A. E. Smith, in Colonists in Bondage, p. 294, quotes a letter in CSPC

from the Governor of Barbados in 1695, in which he claimed that free whites were “domineered over and used like dogs…,” a situation that drove away “…all commonality of white people…Nor can we depend upon these people to fight for defence of the Island when, let who will be master, they cannot be more miserable than their countrymen and fellow subjects make them here.”

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social class below blacks, and became known as “redlegs” or

“redshanks,” who still exist in isolated communities on the

island today. Although redlegs occupy the lowest social and

economic class, they maintain notions of racial superiority.212

When Richard Ligon visited Barbados in 1647, he documented

in considerable detail the physical treatment of “Indian,”

“Negro,” and “Christian” servants at the time when intensive

sugar cane cultivation and the demand for labor were rapidly

expanding. Ligon made frequent mention of both servants and

slaves, and provided some interesting insights into the lives of

the free poor whites, including “the meaner sort of planters.” Of

the latter, he said, “…hard labour, and want of victuals, had so

much depress’d their spirits, as they were come to a declining

and yielding condition…which is able to wear out and quell the

212 See Jill Sheppard, “A Historical Sketch of the Poor Whites of Barbados: From Indentured Servants to ‘Redlegs’”, Caribbean Studies, Vol. 14, No.3 (Oct., 1974): 71-94.; also Hilary McD. Beckles, “A ‘riotous and unruly lot’:Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644-1713,” The William and Mary Quarterly, Third Series, Vol. 47, No. 4 (Oct., 1990): 503-522. In a landmark trial in 1832, a poor free white widow who subsisted by doing sewing for black slaves was allegedly raped by a black slave; originally sentenced to death, the slave’s sentence was commuted to transportation for life. The trial is discussed in Melanie J. Newton, “The King v. Robert James, a Slave, for Rape: Inequality, Gender, and British Slave Amelioration, 1823-1834,) Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Jul., 2005): 583-610.

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best spirit of the world.”213 Of the class distinction between

servants and slaves, Ligon says,

The slaves and their posterity, being subject to their Masters

forever, are kept and preserv’d with greater care than the servants,

who are theirs but for five years, according to the lawof the Island.

So that for the time, the servants have the worser lives, for they are

put to very hard labour, ill lodging, and their dyet

very sleight.214

It is unnecessary to quote the abuses of servants here, as has

been done by nearly every author who has treated the subject. It

suffices to apply Ligon’s general summary:

As for the usage of the Servants, it is much as the Master is,

merciful or cruel; Those that are merciful, treat theirServants

well…But if the Masters be cruel, the Servants have very wearisome

and miserable lives…some cruel Masters will provoke their Servants

so, by extream ill usage, and often and cruel beating them, as they

grow desperate, and so joyn together to revenge themselves upon

them…some amongst them, whose spirits were not able to endure

213 Ligon, 41. 214 Ibid., 43.

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such slavery, resolved to break through it, or dye in

the act…215

Of the blacks, Ligon says that they are “very good servants, if

they be not spoyled by the English”216 and “they are held in such

awe and slavery, as they are fearful to appear in any daring act…

their spirits are subjugated to so low a condition…”217 Ligon

refers to the case of a black whom he sought to convert to

Christianity; when he approached the “Master of the Plantation,”

his response was that, in accordance with the laws of England, he

could no more make a Christian a slave than a slave a

Christian.218

Servants endured slavery, while slaves made good servants:

this is the central paradox of early colonial West Indian labor

usage. It is because of this ambiguity in terms that scholars

seeking to understand the plantation labor system have

historically relied on a theory of opposites, i.e. black and

white labor under different conditions, even though the polarity

is contradicted constantly in seventeenth-century accounts. To 215 Ibid., 44-45.216 Ibid., 44.217 Ibid., 46.218 Ibid., 50.

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borrow an expression from Macaulay, the labor situation was one

big exception. The dichotomy stems from the imposition by

scholars, with modern racial thought, of the late eighteenth and

nineteenth-century southern U.S. plantation labor model on the

seventeenth-century West Indies. They were not the same. To

insist that whites were not slaves is a baseless assumption, as

demonstrated repeatedly in primary source accounts that emerge at

every level of society, from escaped prisoners to the floor of

the House of Commons. The denial of white slavery is in every

sense a result of false historical consciousness. The problem, as

has been shown, is that conditions were highly variable. White

and black labor, both free and unfree, intermingled and

overlapped in multiple strata and conditions of servitude. There

were whites and blacks enslaved for life; there was temporary

slavery; and there were probably often terrible working and

living conditions that must have seemed like slavery to an

affluent surgeon like Pitman. Pitman escaped from Barbados rather

than face the actual slavery of what he referred to as common

servants.

141

There is no single name for the conditions of white or black

servitude. But it is certain that many whites were indeed

enslaved; Macaulay was right. It is equally certain that all but

a fraction of blacks arrived as slaves. The traditional label of

indentured servant implies that whites were all apprenticed

craftsmen, or voluntarily shared the conditions described by

Martin Noell; while some undoubtedly were apprenticed and did

“ride about on horseback,” it is safe to assume that most did

not. Although all were servants, many were not indentured at all;

in any case, indentures were widely abused and seldom adhered to,

which was an issue of little consequence in the face of mortality

rates as high as eighty per cent before the expiration of the

shortest terms of indenture. Slavery was not the opposite of

servitude. Rather, slavery was a component of servitude, an

option that was chosen by the merchant or the master. Even though

King James II stipulated ten years’ service on plantations for

Monmouth’s Rebels, the actual type of servitude they were to

endure, like every servant who set foot on the island of

Barbados, was determined by the merchants who sold the chattels

and the masters who bought them.

142

Several important points must be made in regard to Ligon’s

accounts of Barbadian bond servitude.

First, the thatched hut dwellings and work loads were the

same for the majority of whites and blacks, whether

serving as field hands, overseers, boilers, or domestics.

Second, although the treatment from one master to another

was variable, Ligon’s and many other accounts strongly

support the contention that many white servants were

considered expendable; exceptions were sometimes made for

skilled artisans and craftsmen. Africans, as a more

capital-intensive investment, were preserved accordingly.

Third, Ligon refers to the working conditions of both

Christians and Negros as slavery, regardless of legal

definitions. Ligon seems to view African slavery as

Gardiner viewed white servitude (above), a beatific state

that ignored savage realities.219 Like primary accounts of

Monmouth’s Rebels, Ligon conveys the impression that

slavery was the natural state of Africans, Amerindians,

219 This is an interesting contrast in public perception: a 17th c. Royalist saw black slavery as benign, while a post-emancipation 19th c. Whig saw white servitude as benign. Culturally speaking, class servitude was deemedharmless during both periods by social chroniclers.

143

and many white Europeans. He admired successful planters,

and felt sympathy for those who struggled. There was

nothing inherently wrong with the plantation system of

masters and servants, which was nothing more than an

adaptation of feudal villeinage and serfdom. At different

times over the course of the century, servants and slaves

in Barbados had been attached to the land, or to an

individual’s estate; in either event, they were both

always alienable commodities and private property.

Fourth, Ligon places all black and white servants into

discrete categories of race and culture, without regard

for class stratification except by job description. A

field hand was a field hand, whether African, Indian,

Irish, or English. Ligon did not attach any significance

to, nor make mention of, whether a white was a voluntary

indenture, kidnap victim, political convict, or prisoner

of war; he or she was simply a white servant.

In short, despite all the wondrous detail and splendid prose,

Ligon actually gives what might be termed a limited or

abbreviated report of conditions and events he witnessed, without

144

an appreciation of the nuances in the system that have interested

social historians since the nineteenth century. This may be

because, in Barbados at least, the system was not nuanced or

ambiguous in the minds of the early plantocracy elites: in its

transplanted English form, servitude was originally whatever

masters wanted or needed it to be. Whether or not accommodations

were made for race and culture remains a bone of contention for

the years before 1660: archaeological evidence is non-existent or

inconclusive, and anecdotal evidence of interracial breeding of

slaves is unsubstantiated. The ever-increasing mulatto

population, however, speaks for itself as yet another

contradiction or exception in the class and race discussion.

The nascent West Indian plantation economy was absolutely

secular in that all assets, including servants, were regarded in

terms of commoditized value, which transcended ideological

differences. Quakers, Puritans, Anglicans, Catholics, Royalists,

Tories, Roundheads, and groups of every stripe were on the same

page: acquire land and labor, make a fortune, and retire to a

life of safety and comfort in England with an elevated social

status. This is the formula that is borne out in nearly every

145

account by people in England or in the islands; it was a struggle

for wealth, by which power and security were gained.

This period saw the birth of modern capitalism, which was

enabled by four hundred years of servitude. Following

emancipation in the nineteenth century, white and black servants

were for the most part replaced by true indentured servants from

India and China, complicating the West Indian racial and

sociopolitical class situation even further well into the

twentieth century. What began as an island venture into the

Atlantic trade soon became an empire. In its wake, as Beckles has

eloquently stated,

Within the Caribbean new mentalities and identities were created:

a new people who represent a melange of European, African,

Amerindian and Asian ancestry. Almost every major civilization in

the world was brought to the Caribbean in order to sustain the

conditions for colonial economic growth. The West Indian, therefore,

is a futuristic individual, linked to all major civilizations.

They are the first products of the modern world

system.220

220 Hilary McD. Beckles, “Capitalism, Slavery and Caribbean Modernity,” Callaloo, Vol. 20, No. 4, Eric Williams and the Postcolonial Caribbean: A

146

Yesterday’s shipwrecked, broken mongrels are tomorrow’s

future. The West Indian colonial economic experiment, so clearly

articulated by Sir Walter Raleigh in the sixteenth century as

control of the world by trade and force projection, redefined the

face of human civilization. European empires have come and gone.

All that remains of former imperial nationalist, ethnic, racial,

and class superiority is what some modern scholars refer to as

Western ‘exceptionalism’ or ‘Eurocentrism,’ a renamed historical

consciousness by which modern generations strive to understand

reality in the construction of new social and political

identities. The modern Caribbean region remains plagued by

conflicts of race, ethnicity, and ideology that continue to echo

European conflicts long since vanished into history.221

An unavoidable problem with historical analysis and renaming

is that the reality of a time and place, like seventeenth-century

Barbados, becomes easily misunderstood and misrepresented over

time, which can lead to the false and misplaced confidence that

we understand plantation life better than people who were

Special Issue, 777-789 (Autumn, 1997): 786.221 See Kevin C. Young, “Race as an Instrument of Control and

Exploitation in the Caribbean Region, From the Colonial to the Modern Era,” Sojourn (Spring, 2009), West Long Branch, NJ: Monmouth University: 125-154.

147

actually there. In so believing, we often discount what those

echoes from the past are still trying to tell us because we

cannot or do not want to understand them, like Jeaffreson’s

baseless assumptions and contradictions, or Macaulay’s vain

attempts to understand exceptions. In studying seventeenth-

century accounts of plantation servitude, we see that for the

rulers, Parliament, merchants, planters, and servants of that

century, life was no less full of contradictions than for the

successive generations of historians that have strived to

understand it. As Robert Darnton has suggested, maybe “the

attempt to impose consistency on it [history] is wrong.”222 The

only consistency in West Indian English white servitude is its

inconsistency: the blanket use of the term indentured servitude

to describe white labor is at best vague, and at worst a frequent

misnomer attributable to politicians and merchants like Martin

Noell, and historians like Macaulay who wanted to believe them.

Evidently, a lie repeated long enough can become truth.

Perhaps for leaders like Macaulay, and countless others

throughout history, the best way to create or sustain a new

222 Darnton, 174.

148

reality has been to intentionally modify or selectively represent

history; after all, official state histories are as old as the

earliest written records of humanity. Still, the notion that the

later Stuarts, in particular James II, were the only people to

enslave Englishmen is patently false; Macaulay himself said as

much when describing the helots of Ireland, but not in the same

text as his History. This was a false historical consciousness.

Related to this is the broader false historical belief that

whites were not enslaved in England or its colonies: based on the

evidence presented in this thesis, this is surely a case of

misunderstanding due to politically expedient renaming, by which

the suffering of countless people has been blithely waved off by

generations of historians.

Similarly, the notion that Europeans created race and color-

driven enslavement of Africans is a historical misconception, as

candidly revealed by a Muslim historian over a century before

Genoese ship captains in Portuguese and Spanish vessels explored

the African coastline in search of new trade routes. The fact

that African slaves were owned for life, while tragic, in no way

diminishes the experience of slavery endured by others, even if

149

temporarily. Not all Africans were slaves for life. There were

free blacks, and black indentured servants. Not all servants were

slaves. Not all servants were indentured. Not all indentures were

voluntary. What is certain is that servitude for most Africans,

Amerindians, and Europeans was coerced labor, in which the

servants were bought and sold. For a period in the late

nineteenth century and early twentieth, and again beginning at

the end of the twentieth century, the actual conditions of

servitude for both blacks and whites has been the subject of

renewed scrutiny among scholars who, after reviewing the colonial

sources, have questioned the official history of West Indian

slavery.

The term “indentured servant” has been frequently

misunderstood and misrepresented. Like slavery, indentured

servitude was but a component of servitude. They were both forms

of bond servitude, which is the term most applicable to the

seventeenth-century labor examined in this thesis. A bond was a

generic legal convention that involved a financial transaction or

other transfer of goods or chattel, including a human being.

Easily manipulated to conform to almost any situation, it was

150

nothing more than a contract that could take any form the

drafters intended it to in order to suit their needs. There were

other types of servitude, such as penal servitude experienced by

Rivers and Foyle during Cromwell’s rule, or by those of

Monmouth’s rebels who arrived without indenture. For them, there

were no contracts, but there was servitude for all, and slavery

for some. Thus, slaves, bond-slaves, indentured servants, bond-

servants, and convicts were all servants: this explains the

apparent confusion in seventeenth-century sources such as Ligon’s

account, in which slaves were servants and servants were slaves.

This is not a contradiction after all.

As the first historian to pay even the slightest attention

to the plight of white plantation slaves, Macaulay must be given

credit for bringing the subject into the realm of modern

discussion. His History of England may be faulted for deliberate

distortions, but his distortions lie more in what he did not say,

than in what he said. Despite his biases, he was a social

reformer whose speeches and writings provide inklings of

apologetic self-criticism of imperial race-based politics,

notably with regard to Ireland. As a partisan politician,

151

Macaulay naturally produced a propagandist official history; his

was by no means the first or the last history founded on

ideological myths. To fault Macaulay for having an imperfect or

subjective personal interpretation of events is to fault every

historian; as Gladstone pointed out, Macaulay provided a mirror

of himself. In Macaulay’s timeless mirror, a criminal could be a

martyr, a Dutch prince an English king, or an African servant a

knight’s page. Macaulay’s mirror provides an apt metaphor for

every historian’s perception of reality.

152

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