to achieve productivity goals. For example, during the planting season women worked alongside men clearing fields and holing the land for sowing cane. These tasks were among the most physically demanding work on the plantation. Although excluded from artisanal positions as sugar boilers and distillers, women also worked in the factories feeding canes to the mills and supplying fuel for the boilers. During harvest months, women worked in the cane fields from sunrise to sunset, cutting and carrying canes from the fields to the factories for processing into sugar. At night they worked on a shift system to keep apace the processing of sugar.
Planters seeking to maintain productivity and profitability viewed pregnancy and child care as distractions. Those who were not outright hostile toward biological reproduction were ambivalent; reproduction brought the possibility of increasing the work force, but it was a costly investment because childbearing women had to miss work to give birth and attend their newborns, many of whom did not survive beyond age two. Slave trader John Barnes noted, “Planters of the West Indies in most Cases prefer Males [because] they lose the labour of a Female in the latter End of pregnancy, and for a little time afterwards.” Furthermore, Barnes asserted, “the Child is some years before it can be put to Labour.”7 Supplies and monies permitting, Governor David Parry noted, planters bought “all males, as they will be more immediately profitable by their Work, whereas Females, above Three parts of their time are taken up breeding and suckling a tedious and precarious Offspring, from which no Profit can be expected for many Years to come.”8 Parry emphasized the suckling of infants as time wasted because “precarious” enslaved children rarely survived the materially deprived and diseased conditions into which they were born. Although Jamaican planters profited from the birth and growth of children into adulthood, they were generally reluctant to prioritize pregnancy and childbirth over field and factory work. With few exceptions, before the rise of pronatal abolitionism in the 1780s, planters offered expectant and new mothers only minimal care and relaxation of their labor routines.9
By articulating abolition and reform in terms of women’s reproductive ability, abolitionists pressed planters to reconsider their attitudes toward and the treatment of childbearing women. Slaveholders did not simply adopt metropolitan prescriptions on how best to increase biological reproduction, however. They interpreted and shaped policy according to the needs and wants of their sugar plantations as well as their perceptions of the capabilities and intimate lives of captive Africans. Planters determined that revisions in purchasing patterns, as they pertained to the sex, age, and ethnicity of imported Africans, were needed to reverse population decline. Before the slave trade ended, buyers aimed to stock their plantations with women most likely to reproduce. This attentiveness to the childbearing histories and reproductive potential of women in the closing decades of the slave trade (1780s-1807) shifted the importance of women and reproduction in the plantation economies. It marked a major transformation in the policy and practice of previous decades when planters considered pregnancy, childbirth, and child-rearing as liabilities.
The changing value of the reproductive capacity of female captives brought unwelcome interventions in the intimate lives of enslaved men and women. In addition to stocking their plantations with females they perceived as the “best breeding” people, Jamaican planters intervened in the sexual lives of enslaved men and women to capitalize on the reproductive promise of their purchases. Planters’ reproductive interventions not only contrasted with policies proposed by abolitionists, they also conflicted with enslaved people’s own views about the formation of sexual partnerships. The clash that would erupt between enslaver and enslaved reflected the authority slave owners claimed over the bodies of people they owned and the power enslaved people claimed to control their bodies.
Strategies for Breeding: Sex and Age Preferences
Between 1788 and 1807, sugar estate owners and managers aimed to buy females in far greater numbers than in previous decades in order to achieve parity between the sexes or, in some cases, to obtain more women than men. The absentee proprietor of Amity Hall estate, Henry Goulburn, implored his attorney, Thomas Samson, to “purchase [more] women in preference to males until the numbers of each are equal.” This method of buying, Goulburn explained, was the “means alone that we shall be able to keep our stock without diminution.”10 In another planter’s view, a major obstacle to successfully increasing birthrates was that the estates had “a great many more men than women.”11 An examination of the transatlantic slave trade database confirms that males were likely to outnumber females on Jamaican sugar estates because of a greater number of males traded. In the twenty-year period before the start of Britain’s national campaign to shut down the African labor supply (1769–88), males steadily accounted for at least 60 percent of imported workers (Figure 2a). This pattern persisted into the last twenty years of the trade’s legal existence (1788–1808) with some years showing a 60 to 70 percent purchase of males (Figure 2b).
Figure 2a. Sex and Age Ratio, Jamaica, 1769–87. Source: Data compiled from Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (2009), http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed January 29, 2012).
While the slave trade database confirms preponderance of males, individual plantation records of annual slave increase and decrease show a narrower, and sometimes nonexistent, gap between males and females. Records for Worthy Park estate, for example, consistently show that males never outnumbered females by more than 5 percent in any given year between 1784 and 1796 (Figure 3). Similar patterns emerge for Golden Grove estate that show some years when females outnumbered males and other years when only a few slaves accounted for the sex ratio gap (Figure 4). For example, in 1768, the 50.1 percent females (184) surpassed the 49.8 percent males (183). In June 1792, the period that listed the greatest proportion of males (248), the property needed only a 4.7 percent increase in females (205) to achieve sexual parity.
Figure 2b. Sex and Age Ratio, Jamaica, 1788–1808. Source: Data compiled from Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (2009), http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed January 29, 2012).
A demographic history of Jamaica’s slave population between 1807 and 1834 not only confirms a small skewed sex ratio in favor of men, it also reveals that in many cases the proportion of women exceeded men on sugar plantations.12 The slave population profile of Jamaica in 1817, the earliest year with comprehensive census data, reveals a ratio of 117.8 males to 100 females among the African-born population, and 91.4 males to 100 females among the island-born population (Creoles). While the overall sex ratio confirms that Jamaican buyers consistently imported more African males than females, the mortality rate among men was higher. An excessive death rate for males was especially true in the parishes where sugar plantations dominated and had the largest concentration of unfree workers. With the exception of only St. Thomas-in-the-East Parish, the female population surpassed the male population in all the sugar-producing parishes, many of which were home to the estates examined in this study, including Trewlany, St. John, and St. James. Males outnumbered females because of lower male mortality rates in other Jamaican parishes such as Manchester, St. Ann, St. Thomas-in-the-Vale, St. Mary, Port Royal, and St. George, where enslaved workers cultivated other crops and were engaged in diverse economic activities, like pimento and coffee growing as well as livestock rearing. Parishes with larger urban centers like St. Catherine and Kingston show the widest gap in sex ratios, with females outnumbering males by almost twenty to one. Urban economies depended on trade, manufacture, and domestic service, in which more women worked than in agriculture, which dominated the rural parishes. The problem plaguing sugar plantations was not so
