that the distress from want of provisions to feed the poor and slaves was not exaggerated as the governor claimed.123 Without significant demographic statistics for the period, Watson asserts that “the situation [of scarcity of food] with respect to the slave population is less clear,” but one can surmise that when the “urban poor” suffered, the urban enslaved enjoyed no better conditions, given the deeply stratified social conditions in which the enslaved occupied the lowest status.
While slave owners might have wanted to keep their investments in human property alive, when forced to choose between their own lives and the lives of their slaves one can assume they chose themselves.124 This is evident in the general maltreatment of slaves throughout the islands, slave laws demanding mutilating punishments for alleged crimes, the dangerous tasks they were assigned in times of war and disaster, and travelers’ and locals’ observations during the eighteenth century on the depraved appearance of enslaved people in town.125 William Dickson, a resident of Barbados in the late eighteenth century, described “several worn out and leprous negroes, who frequented the more public parts of [Bridgetown], especially the market and both the bridges.” His recollection included “a most miserable and leprous woman … in the alley parallel to and between, Broad street and Jew Street,” and another “negro” woman whose “naked and extenuated corpse [was] … surrounded with ordure and vermin.”126 Enslaved people past their productive labor were sometimes left to fend for themselves, and Bridgetown became frequented by those destitute from lack of food and shelter and ill from disease.127
The urban slaves’ susceptibility to danger was likewise acutely visible in times of natural disaster. One of the most devastating events in Barbados history occurred on the morning of October 10, 1780, when a colossal hurricane struck the island and its neighboring colonies, including Jamaica far to the north.128 This notorious hurricane produced volumes of desperate correspondence from officials and residents describing ruin beyond anything previously experienced. Even the governor and his family were forced into the open as the roof of their home tore away.129 Bridgetown felt the force of the storm. Several witnesses, including colonial officials, described the extreme destruction. One resident wrote, “Scarce a house is standing in Bridgetown; whole families were buried in the ruins of their habitations.”130 Governor Cunningham reported, “Bridge Town our Capital is now a [heap] of ruins, the Court House & Prisons, where criminals & Prisoners of War were confined, lies open, therefore the Prisoners of all kinds are at liberty.”131 Although some enslaved might have been inadvertently set free, they likely did not survive for long due to the food shortages and destruction of homes. Many witnesses and victims wrote in apprehension of the sight and sounds of death throughout the towns and countryside. Several men of the Barbados Council wrote an address to King George III declaring their horror of hearing “the dying groans of a very considerable number of the inhabitants, who lay expiring in the streets of the towns … a circumstance too shocking to even mention.”132 Significant attention in the written reports also focused on slaves, noting their lack of shelter and impending starvation.133 A Barbadian planter wrote about ships being sent to North America to secure provisions, “without a supply of which numbers must die of famine: 1000 negroes have perished that way since the hurricane for want.”134 All inhabitants suffered from the 1780 hurricane, but evidence illuminates the particular hardships endured by the enslaved.135
John Gay Alleyne, speaker of the House of Assembly and a wealthy planter, expressed concern for his prospective loss of property in dying slaves. Alleyne implores, “The King’s Most Excellent Majesty … we dread a scarcity of [Indian corn] … for the subsistence of our negroes, and that a famine will complete that misery which the tempest may then seem only to have begun.”136 The limited diet of the enslaved made them incredibly vulnerable to any threats to these sources of sustenance. In contrast to the quality of food to which planters and slave owners had access to during disasters, the enslaved either starved or struggled to survive the diseases that spread across the island following hurricanes.137 Meanwhile colonists scrambled to prevent their loss of profits. Authorities feared not only famine and the death of their enslaved but also unrest and revolt due to the chaos after disasters.138 Evidence of colonial authorities’ fear and their efforts to exert control can be read in the technologies and architectures they developed to confine the urban enslaved population before and after the hurricane of 1780.
Architectures of Control
There was an obvious link between enslaved bodies in urban space and architectures of control. White supremacy was expressed in ideology, physical exertion, and inanimate symbols of power to the enslaved population with structures such as the common gaol, the execution gallows, or the Cage. These architectures served as stark reminders of the consequences of resistance to the enslaved even as they grafted a criminal identity onto their bodies.139 In Barbados the concentration of power was expressed through the organization of labor, punishment, and space. Barbados slave owners and the colonial government built and maintained urban carceral sites and practiced the spectacle of mobile punishments—whipping the same enslaved body in different locations—to (re)produce and exercise the forms of discipline that were found on plantations.
The control wielded by slave owners, overseers, and drivers on plantations was shared with constables, magistrates, jumpers, and executioners in urban areas.140 On the plantation, punishment for most offenses committed by the enslaved, whether purposely or in self-defense, remained in the hands of the planter, overseer, or driver. These men used the whip and other physical forms of discipline at their discretion with little, if any, regulation from colonial authorities. In town, however, in the absence of a “gang” of laboring workers and the urban reality of more individualized tasks, the white men appointed as constables and watchmen served as representatives of the urban slave holder, non-slave holders, and the larger white population and were given authority to mete out punishments on enslaved bodies.141
Power to inflict physical punishment extended to the judiciary as well as magistrates, who could order a whipping at their discretion, even if the slaveholder was not present or aware that the slave had been taken up by a constable. For instance, an Act passed in January 1708 allowed any justice of the peace to order “one and twenty stripes,” of the whip on any slave caught selling allegedly stolen goods.142 The slaveholder was required to pay for both the captivity of his/her “property” and the whipping, illustrating the extent to which control of “slave behavior” was enforced from many areas of urban society and was distinct from plantation discipline.143 Punishments on enslaved bodies included public displays of colonial power, and Bridgetown contained several spaces that invoked fear in the absence of the spatial confinement of the plantation complex. These spaces reproduced criminal identities, racial terror, and mortal confinement in urban Barbados.
An enslaved woman walking from one end of Bridgetown to the other would pass scenes and “visible symbols” of public punishment reinforcing the threat of violence as well as her own racial and gendered status.144 Such sites included the Cage, James Fort, the Custom House, taverns, brothels busy streets, and the commercial warehouses that lined the active wharf. Seemingly neutral sites occupied by enslaved women engaged in economic endeavors, such as the Milk Market or Great Market, were also spaces of terror since punishments were often meted out in different locations. For instance, Grigg and Bess were prosecuted for the theft of a cow in February 1743. This felony conviction carried the sentence of death. While Bess’s sentence of guilt was reversed, Grigg was ordered to be whipped by the town “jumper.” The order stated specifically that he be released from incarceration once “The Gaoler or his Deputy See … that [Grigg] first receive 39 Lashes on his bare back (vizt.) 13 at the Roebuck 13 at the Cage and 13 at the Custom House.”145 “The Roebuck,” or Roebuck Street was a busy district of shops and foot traffic and largely occupied by free(d) people of color by the end of the eighteenth century.146 Indeed, even the free population of color suffered the proximity to the violence of slavery. Likewise, the Custom House sat in the center of town where Grigg’s punishment
