a tree in a yard. He then flogged her as hard as he could lick, both with the whip and cowskin, till she was all over streaming with blood. He rested, and then he beat her again and again.…The consequence was that poor Hetty was brought to bed before her time, and was delivered after severe labour of a dead child.
A few days later, Hetty died of her injuries.1
Abolitionists used stories like Hetty’s to garner support for colonial reform and eventual emancipation. Hetty’s experience illustrated why West Indian slave populations failed to reproduce. Planters were unusually cruel in their treatment of enslaved women. According to abolitionists like James Ramsay, who previously resided in the colonies, masters commonly stripped women of their clothes, exposing their naked bodies as they whipped them. They endangered women’s lives and denied them modesty and decency. The special circumstances of pregnancy, abolitionists argued, did not mitigate planter cruelty. As Hetty’s case vividly demonstrated, expectant mothers were vulnerable to their masters’ caprice, cutting short their own and their babies’ lives.
In addition to emphasizing the cruel treatment of women and expectant mothers, abolitionists also singled out strenuous labor regimes as an important factor that negatively affected women’s ability to reproduce. Women worked undifferentiated from men in some of the most physically demanding tasks in the field. The few women who conceived received no relaxation of their work responsibilities. An even smaller number of women had successful pregnancies. Many women suffered miscarriages or prematurely delivered stillborn babies because of the physically taxing labor they performed. The harshness of labor and punishment, abolitionists concluded, made it difficult for the plantations to sustain their slave populations by births. Reforming these areas was vital to stimulate population growth, wean planter dependence on the slave trade, and prepare the colonies for a transition from slavery to freedom.
Local conditions determined the colonial twofold response to abolitionists’ quest to affect reproduction among enslaved women. First, the local government passed a series of legislation to alleviate the aspects of slavery it thought impeded the growth of slave population. Between the 1780s and 1820s, the Jamaican Assembly passed laws based on its own initiatives as well as in accordance with mandates from the Crown. During the 1820s in particular, and with much wrangling and many amendments, colonial assemblies adopted general ameliorative laws insisted on by the imperial Parliament. Second, estate owners and managers enforced abolitionist reforms and colonial laws according to the needs of their properties. The details of amelioration, worked out in the colonies, reflected planter concerns for profit and maintaining productivity, putting them in conflict with metropolitan and local government reformers. Although planters dominated the Jamaican Assembly, its members were among the most elite and idealistic whose visions for the colony as a whole were sometimes out of step with individual planter goals. Legal reforms promised to alleviate some of the worst aspects of slavery that undermined slave population growth. But their immediate and full-scale adoption could cause the collapse of the sugar plantations and undermine the power of slaveholders. In their daily running of the sugar estates, plantation agents managed such risks.
Pronatal policy changes and risk management resulted in multilayered conflicts. One struggle occurred among abolitionists, Parliament, and the local government, over who should control policy relating to women’s reproductive labor. A second struggle took place among abolitionists, who proposed a series of pronatal reforms; the local government, which passed pronatal legislation; and slaveholders, who interpreted and enforced policies according to the need to maintain plantation productivity and protect their power. Attorneys who managed estates conflicted with their England-based employers who insisted on reforms that were more in line with abstract abolitionist proposals than a true understanding of the everyday labor and production needs of their estates.
These contests to control female slaves’ reproductive labor led to the simultaneous contraction and expansion of enslaved people’s liberties. Would-be mothers came more directly under the scrutiny of planters and doctors who tried to regulate labor and punishment according to their views about what best protected fertility. New laws empowered enslaved people to take their masters to courts, while the promised mitigation of punishment and relaxation of work regimes entitled women to claim protection from some of the worst elements of slavery. The claims enslaved men and women made on the liberties pronatalism afforded them extended their ongoing conflicts with their enslavers. A third set of struggles, therefore, occurred between plantation agents and enslaved people, who had conflicting views about appropriate responsibilities and discipline for women during pregnancy. These struggles reflect not just the ways in which pronatal abolitionism transformed enslaved women’s lives; they also reveal the centrality of women’s reproductive labor to the moral and economic ambitions of abolitionists and slaveholders, and reproductive concerns as essential to enslaved people’s resistance.
Pregnancy and Labor
Planters knew that field labor negatively affected childbearing but assumed that other tasks not related to sugarcane planting or sugar manufacturing would be more conducive to promoting healthy pregnancies. Planter Edward Long asserted, “Domestic Negroes have more children in proportion to those on the pens; and the latter than those who are employed on the sugar plantation. I will not deny,” Long declared, “Negroes breed the best, whose labour is least or easiest.”2 It is unclear whether the “pen” Long wrote about was a “livestock pen” operated as an independent unit or a “satellite pen” attached to sugar plantations. Although sugar dominated Jamaica’s economy from the late seventeenth century on, many investors capitalized on the need for independent industries, such as livestock farming and manure production. Their chief consumers were sugar planters, who relied on cattle for manure, haulage, transportation, and food. By the mid-eighteenth century, sugar planters who had been experimenting with new ways of increasing the efficiency and profitability of their estates invested in producing their own cattle on remote or unproductive parts of their properties. On sugar plantations like Golden Grove, Phillipsfield, and Pleasant Hill that evolved into “dual pen/sugar plantation” units, pens became a convalescent work site for seasoning new workers, recuperating sick workers, and retiring old workers, because planters insisted that pen-related work was lighter. In addition to cultivating pastures, digging watering holes, erecting fences, and collecting fodder, pen workers cultivated food crops like plantains and yams.3
Scholars comparing the labor routines of pens to plantations have argued that it was not “lighter” or “easier” work.4 Digging water holes and planting grass could be just as taxing on the body as digging cane holes and planting cane. The major difference between livestock pens and sugar plantations was that pens had no annual harvest that required workers to work around the clock.5 Planter perception that pen work was “easier” than tasks on the sugar estate, however, influenced how they managed female slaves they purchased for reproductive purposes. In 1789, attorney Simon Taylor promised to place the recently purchased young “wenches” at Bachelor’s Hall pen (attached to Golden Grove estate). There, he related, they “shall do no other work but to clean cocos [and] yams, which is the lightest work … and they shall not interfere with the estate’s work and [they] shall have every chance of breeding that is possible.”6
Assessing the estimation of Edward Long and Simon Taylor that women pen workers bore more children than sugar estate workers is more complicated than might be assumed. A demographic study using the register of returns of independent livestock pens reveals higher rates of natural increase, while an analysis of accounts of increase and decrease for dual pen-sugar plantation units suggests that workers on satellite pens had smaller families than women working on sugar estates.7 In comparison to women workers at John Tharp’s sugar estates (including Good Hope and Merrywood), fewer women at the pens (including Windsor, Chippenham Park, Covey, and Top Hill) bore the requisite six children to allow them full reprieve from plantation work in accordance with Jamaica’s ameliorative laws that exempted mothers with large families from field work.8 At Windsor pen in 1818, for example, only one woman, Keatty Ebo, took care of her children on a fulltime basis. We do not know, however, how many
