Creoles, he asserted, were more suited for cultivating the colonies, since they were more “hardy, diligent and trusty” than Africans.64 Using earlier estimates presented by planter Edward Long, Ramsay argued that Creoles were more productive than new captives. According to Long’s estimate, Creoles produced 250,000 hogsheads more sugar than imported captive Africans.65 Although Ramsay denounced the slave trade and slavery as immoral, he praised what in his estimation were improvements among African-descended people born in the colonies. “The farther back the negro can trace his Creolism,” he argued, “the more he valued himself and the more he was valued.”66 In commending what he presumed as the more civilized Creoles, Ramsay once more exposed his latent view that slavery was not the only reason he perceived African-descended people as culturally inferior. The African homeland also played a part in shaping its people’s supposed backwardness. Such postulations reiterated his position that reform through biological reproduction would not replicate African vices because they were learned, not inherited.
Believing that mixed-race children were even more sophisticated than Creoles, abolitionists advocated for their immediate freedom to the custody of churchwardens. Appointed custodians would act as guardians of colored children and ensure their placement into a “trade or business [in keeping] with their inclination and the demands of the colony.” The white fathers and owners of mixed-race children should bear the expenses of apprenticeship. In cases where the child’s father was not its owner, the father should secure its freedom by paying the mother’s owner the “right pounds sterling, as soon as the child is weaned.” The manumitted colored child should then be apprenticed to an appropriate trade. Fathers who refused to secure their children’s freedom and apprenticeship should be “fined an annuity equal to their [children’s] maintenance.”67
This proposal resembled the eighteenth-century British apprenticeship system in which family members or government ministries apprenticed young people. Private arrangements allowed children to learn the operations of a particular enterprise from a family friend or a business associate. In some cases, apprenticeship was simply girls working alongside their mothers to learn domestic chores, or boys working with their fathers to become carpenters, bricklayers, or farmers. In the more formal arrangements organized by individual parishes, the state placed apprentices with employers who would train them in service, agriculture, or industrial manufacture. The British apprenticeship system aimed to inculcate habits of industry and place children into their proper gender and class roles. Apprenticeships were not just about learning a skill; they also aimed to prepare girls for their life of domesticity and boys for more public roles.68 The heteropatriarchy of the apprenticeship program for mixed-race boys and girls implicitly promoted biological reproduction among the more “advanced” segments of the unfree population, whose freedom ahead of the blacks (meaning no racial intermixing) positioned them as exemplars of appropriate gender order. In singling out mixed-race children for immediate freedom and apprenticeship, the proposal promoted the racial hierarchy that built slavery.
Enslaved women and their children were essential to abolitionist goals of transforming the colonies from slave to free societies. Having received improved treatment, women were expected to birth a greater number of children, who would then be trained from their infancy to become moral and industrious free people. Children were far more crucial to the project of creating free societies than adults. Although the foundations of creating a free society rested on women’s ability to reproduce, the difficulties of reconditioning the minds of adults made them somewhat of a lost generation to the ultimate project of freedom. Abolitionist pronatal plans made it clear that the question was not simply one of changing status from slave to free. Imperial reformers envisioned enslaved people acculturated to British morality and values that included subordinating women as homemakers and elevating men as heads of their households, which would help to achieve the reformers’ goals for population growth. Abolitionist plans therefore firmly lodged the future of the sugar colonies within enslaved women’s bellies. Once their offspring were “raised up in the knowledge of their duty,” they would become “at last civilized” and capable of being “lifted into equality with Englishmen.”69 The rhetoric and plans of abolitionists gave new meanings and significance to biological reproduction, motherhood, and childhood. Enslaved women could be sources of freedom if their offspring could be groomed to adopt British cultural practices and social organization.
The practical steps of achieving such plans—building hospitals and nurseries, enforcing early weaning, rewarding mothers with clothes, food, and labor exemption, and allowing missionaries to proselytize among slaves—established a blueprint for amelioration. The plans remained largely conceptual, however, because their implementation depended on estate owners and agents in the colonies. Ideological differences over the capacity of African-descended people to adopt British habits and values engendered tensions between abolitionists and planters. The slaving interests defined Africans and their descendants as innately inferior and incapable of reform or working without brute force. Abolitionists argued, however, that the enslaved were a people corrupted by slavery. Given the right training and incentives, their children at least could be reformed and fitted for freedom.
The ideological entanglements between abolitionists and planters stretched beyond the articulation of abolition and reform through the reproductive lives of enslaved women. As the next two chapters show, the contested nature of pronatalism centered on the fact that colonial capitalists were driven not by moral but rather by economic imperatives. The working out of reforms in the colonies was subordinated to planter interests, who prioritized maintaining sugar production and increasing profits. Because concerns for day-to-day productivity and profitability of sugar estates dictated reproductive interventions, abolitionist moral ambitions were subordinated to the economic ambitions of plantation agents and owners.
Chapter 2
“The Best Ones Who Are Fit to Breed”: The Quest for Biological Reproduction
In 1789, Simon Taylor proposed buying more African women for Golden Grove, one of the six Jamaican sugar plantations he managed.1 “The first good Eboe ship that comes in,” he wrote, “I will endeavour to get ten women out of her.”2 Taylor had dismissed suggestions to increase the female population on the property in 1770, so his proposal surprised his absentee employer, Golden Grove’s proprietor, Chaloner Arcedekne. The transatlantic correspondence between Taylor and Arcedekne about buying more females for Golden Grove was part of a common practice among Jamaican proprietors in which they appointed attorneys to act on their behalf while they returned to live in England. Throughout the eighteenth century, as properties passed from one generation to the next, many heirs never even had to set foot on the island.3 The letter Taylor wrote in 1789 was in response to an earlier one written by Arcedekne discussing the possibility that a slave trading ban would force them to encourage biological reproduction among Jamaica’s bonded workers.
In 1770, Taylor dismissed Arcedekne’s proposal to buy more females from the slave trade because he, like many other Jamaican plantation managers, viewed women as incompetent workers. “In regard to purchasing fifteen females to five Negroes,” he wrote, “it can by no means answer at Golden Grove, for you want men infinitely more than women, for there are many things which women cannot do.”4 Planters were reluctant to buy females for their Jamaican sugar estates throughout the seventeenth century and eighteenth century.5 They preferred buying males because they considered them more versatile and capable of performing the variously demanding agroindustrial tasks of the sugar plantations. William Beckford, heir to his father’s extensive Westmoreland properties where he spent thirteen years as a resident proprietor before becoming an absentee planter and publishing his experiences, explained, “A Negro man is purchased for a trade or cultivation and different process of the cane.” Women, however, could efficiently perform “only two [roles:] the house, with its several departments, and the supposed indulgences, or the field with its exaggerated labours.”6
Despite their repeated assertions that slave women were less capable and less
