‘Rioting in goatish embraces’: Marriage and improvement in early British Jamaica

History of the Family 11 (2006) 185 – 197

‘Rioting in goatish embraces’: Marriage and improvement in early British Jamaica Trevor Burnard Department of American Studies, University of Sussex, Brighton, BN1 9QN, UK

Abstract Marriages were relatively infrequent among the white population of early British Jamaica. This article examines the ideological implications of the failure of whites to marry with sufficient regularity to ensure that white population increase would allow Jamaica to become a settler society on the British North American model. It looks, in particular, at the tendency of whites to live in irregular unions, either with other whites or with black or brown concubines, and the effect that such arrangements had on perceptions of white Jamaicans as especially immoral. It connects these views with other discourses on settler societies in which improvement and frequent marriage were linked. © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Keywords: Marriage; Improvement; Jamaica; Concubinage; Degeneracy; Free coloureds; Civilisation

In the summer of 1750, Henry Bright, a Bristol merchant living in Kingston, Jamaica, wrote to a business associate that his brother Francis was about to be married to a young widow, aged 21. His prospective bride was ‘an agreeable woman’ worth about £600 per annum and between £8–10,000 in total, with ‘forty or fifty fine negroes.’ As Henry commented, ‘for a Creole the woman is well enough.’ The prospective bride was born Sybella Elizabeth Sigler, who had married at 16 to Thomas Lombard, a Kingston merchant. The couple had one child, Eleanor, who died soon after birth. Thomas Lombard died in December 1749 and the rich young widow went looking for a new husband, ‘making it a point to stay nine months after the death of her husband.’ Francis Bright had much to recommend him. A factor for the Bristol firm of Bright, Whatley and Co., he had a promising career in front of him as a Kingston merchant. But if unmarried, he was not unattached. A month before Mrs. Lombard buried her infant daughter, Bright's mistress, a widow named Mary Rogers, had buried their newborn son, Robert. Francis' dalliances did not deter Sybella. But on the appointed day of the wedding, Sybella insisted that ‘her whole fortune [be] settled in trust for her.’ Francis refused, much to the satisfaction of Henry Bright, who wrote to Richard Meyler, in February 1751, that Francis will ‘think no more about a creole lady.’1 Sybella remarried Samuel Shiffner of Kingston in 1751. She was married at 16, a mother at 20, a widow at 21, remarried at 23, and died at 29. Her wealth gave her options denied to Mary Rogers. Rogers either E-mail address: [email protected]. Francis died in July 1754, leaving a net estate of £2636 sterling. Mary Rogers did not remarry but ran several Kingston taverns in Kingston, dying in November 1764. Henry Bright to Richard Meyler, August, September, and February 1751, BFP 33/1, 42a/2/1, Bright Papers, University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia; Kingston and St. Catherine Parish Registers, Island Record Office Armoury, Spanishtown, Jamaica. Francis Bright did not mention Mary Rogers in his will. ‘Abstracts of Jamaica Wills, 1625–1792’. Add. Mss., 34,181, British Library, London. 1

1081-602X/$ - see front matter © 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.hisfam.2006.12.001

186

T. Burnard / History of the Family 11 (2006) 185–197

could not remarry, or chose not to do so. The different marriage options of each suggest a variegated marriage market in eighteenth century Jamaica, shaped both by a demographic system dominated by high white mortality and also by ideological beliefs that downgraded the social importance of marriage. One thing, however, united Francis, Sybella, and Mary. All died without descendants. 1. The extent of marriage In this article, I explore the effects of living in a high-mortality demographic regime on early modern marriage, focusing on the ideological importance of marriage in a society in which alternative living arrangements – concubinage, often with black and coloured women – was socially acceptable. The extent of marriage in early Jamaica, especially among white men, is important for ideological as well as demographic reasons. When white men did not marry white women but confined their attentions to irregular unions with black or coloured women, then the possibility of Jamaica becoming a settler society populated by native-born and naturally reproducing white families was greatly reduced. When white men cohabitated rather than married, the number of white children produced fell and the number of mulatto children rose. Throughout the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, brown Jamaicans increasingly supplanted white Jamaicans as the dominant group in the free population. Moreover, when white men did not marry but lived in concubinage, they laid themselves open to charges of immorality. White Jamaicans were especially sensitive to such charges during the abolitionist period as abolitionists regularly linked white immorality with slavery and attacked both as un-Christian. The inability or unwillingness of white Jamaicans to enter into and sustain marriage became a litmus test that demonstrated that Jamaica and the slave system that was vital to white Jamaicans' interests was a monstrous social failure (Brown, 2006, pp. 365–72; Lambert, 2005; Ramsay, 1784; Raphael & Macfie, 1976, pp. 206–7). Thus, in the view of people worried about white settlement in Jamaica, Bright's behaviour was not just immoral but socially irresponsible. Bright needed to marry a white woman and produce legitimate children who would form the stock of a rising generation of white Jamaicans. Instead, he propagated outside marriage, unusually with a white rather than with a brown woman. But her colour was beside the point. Bright's licentiousness demonstrated that Jamaica was not yet a civilised place. When British Americans talked of civilisation, they linked their discussion to the related concept of improvement, by which they meant not only economic development but also a particular definition of social arrangements (Greene, 1985, pp.15–16). Rather simplistically, they contrasted an improved society–settled, cultivated, civilised, orderly, developed, and polite–to its binary opposite, savagery. In Jamaica, where Africans comprised 90% of the population by the early eighteenth century, the savage was inevitably African. European observers especially abhorred Africans' seemingly immoderate sexual appetites and their irregular family relationships. In their accounts, Africans were inconstant, profligate, sexually immodest, and did not care properly for their children and dependents. All these deficiencies combined to confirm and consign Africans to their natural state as degenerate barbarians (Jordan, 1968, pp. 32–40; Morgan, 2004, pp. 12–49). Europeans were superior to such savages in many ways, not least in their ordered, and prolific, family life. The successful establishment of British family patterns in the New World by the eighteenth century was a signal indication that the colonies were becoming increasingly similar to Britain itself, the very model of an ordered, civilised, and improved society. The achievement of ‘normal’ family conditions and the evidence of rapid population growth in lands full of abundance showed that British America was a flourishing, improved society that deserved greater recognition from the metropolis (Edelson, 2006; Marsh, 2007). Benjamin Franklin made explicit the link between family patterns, rapid population increase, prosperity, and increased political responsibility in Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind. For Franklin, marriage was both cause and effect of colonial prosperity. Because opportunity was greater in the colonies than in Britain, men and women were ‘not afraid to marry.’ Consequently, marriages were more frequent, people married at younger ages, and children were more abundant than in Europe. Natural increase resulted, allowing further exploitation of limitless western land and creating further prosperity. Soon, Franklin asserted, North America would contain more Britons than Britain itself and America might even eventually displace Britain as the seat of empire (Franklin, 1959, vol. 4 p. 227; Fender, 1993, pp. 335–46). The phenomenon of natural increase in North America also allowed Franklin to disprove a favourite argument of European philosophies that animate life in the New World was degenerate, with animals and humans in the Americas smaller, weaker, less varied, and less fecund than in Europe. Peter Kalm, a Swedish traveller and scientist, argued that Europeans ‘degenerated’ in the Americas, marrying later, producing fewer children, and dying more quickly than their European counterparts. Comte de Buffon, the famous French naturalist, was not so

T. Burnard / History of the Family 11 (2006) 185–197

187

Table 1 Number of marriages by decade and as percentage of population: St Andrew, St Catherine, Kingston, 1670–1780 St Andrew

1670s 1680s 1690s 1700s 1710s 1720s 1730s 1740s 1750s 1760s 1770s

St Catherine

Kingston

(1)

(2)

(1)

(2)

(1)

(2)

27 23 23 14 6 6 4 6 4 7 6

2.2 2.0 2.3 1.8 1.0 1.1 0.8 1.0 0.7 1.1 1.0

38 29 38 28 20 19 14 14 16 NA NA

2.6 2.2 3.2 2.6 2.0 2.2 1.6 1.4 1.5 NA NA

NA NA NA NA NA 27 26 33 25 22 22

NA NA NA NA NA 1.8 1.5 1.5 0.9 0.6 0.5

(1) Average number of marriages per annum averaged over a decade. (2) Percentage of population per annum marrying averaged over a decade. Source: St. Andrew, St. Catherine, Kingston parish registers, 1666–1780, Island Record Office Armoury.

certain that Europeans declined when they moved to the New World but held to the general principle of American degeneracy. One of the great intellectual concerns for Creole intellectuals in the America was proving Buffon wrong. Franklin's demonstration that Europeans in fact prospered in North America was one sally in this assault on Buffon's authority (Canizares-Esguerra, 2001; Chinard, 1947). Buffon' position might not have been undermined so easily if a study had been made of how European populations fared in the British Caribbean. There, the notion of degeneracy in the Americas had much stronger currency than in temperate North America. In Jamaica, marriages were neither fruitful nor especially frequent. Unlike colonists in British North America, white Jamaicans did not recreate British family patterns in the New World. Instead, they adopted what commentators feared were African familial practices. As J.B. Moreton argued in 1793, even men born in ‘colder regions’ began ‘to melt …like wax softened by heat’ into West Indian customs once ‘innured’ to the heat of the ‘torrid zone.’ Native born Jamaican men, ‘children of the sun,’ found African manners and customs so ‘native and congenial to their hearts’ that they became ‘eternal votaries to the revels of Bacchus and Venus,’ where they ‘luxuriantly and voluptuously’ spent their days and nights in ‘dissipations dear delightful downy lap’ (Moreton, 1793, p.78). By the late eighteenth century, European receptivity to African mores made settler elites in the British West Indies less strongly chauvinistic than their counterparts in either Spanish America or the British mainland. The limited patriotism of elite whites in the British Caribbean reflected ‘the instinctive ambivalence of a group whose hearts and minds remained adamantly European while their bodies responded to the overpowering impact of African ethnic and cultural influences on their brittle plantation world’ (Elliott, 2006, pp. 339–40, 376–7, 382, 397–8; Knight, 1978, p.64). To European observers, white Jamaicans' weak commitment to marriage and the failure of the white population to increase suggested degeneration. Degeneration was a word with, as now, distinct moral overtones. In particular, by not marrying as often as they ought and by their frequent connections with African women, white Jamaican men aligned themselves to an alarming degree with the values and ‘savagery’ of a degenerate people. Such behaviour was dangerously close to incivility, in addition to being both immoral and un-Christian. Moreover, by having a ‘great aversion to matrimonial connexions,’ Thomas Atwood averred, men in the West Indies ‘impeded’ colonisation efforts. (Atwood, 1791, pp. 209–10) Atwood recognised, as did Franklin, that successful colonisation was marked by natural population increase. The frequency of marriage was the principal determinant of such increase. What are the figures on white Jamaican marriage? The parish registers of St. Andrew, St. Catherine, and Kingston list 5079 marriages between 1666 and 1780. These registers help us assess whether white Jamaicans married.2 The average number of marriages entered into in each decade is presented in Table 1. The quantitative record does not at first substantiate low marriage rates, although it does suggest that there was a precipitous decline in the frequency of marriage over time. In England, the crude marriage rate ranged between near 7 and 10 per 1000 people in the 2

St Andrew, 1666–1780: 1296 marriages; St. Catherine, 1666–1763: 2263 marriages; Kingston, 1721–1780: 1,520 marriages. I have excluded marriages involving black or colored people, of which 52 occurred in St. Catherine and 31 in Kingston. St. Catherine and Kingston Parish Registers.

188

T. Burnard / History of the Family 11 (2006) 185–197

seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Wrigley & Schofield, 1989, pp. 528–29). In St. Andrew in the seventeenth century and in St. Catherine until 1730, the crude rate of marriage ranged between 20 and 32 per 1000. The crude marriage rate declined in the eighteenth century, especially in St. Andrew and Kingston, but, except in Kingston in the 1770s, did not dip appreciably below English rates and, in St. Catherine, remained significantly higher than in England throughout the period of coverage. More precise figures on marriage rates can be obtained for 1673 and 1730, when censuses of white population were taken. In 1673, 65 marriages occurred in an adult white population in St. Andrew and St. Catherine of 2782 (23 per 1000). By 1730, the number of marriages among the 2388 adult whites in Kingston, St. Andrew, and St. Catherine was 44 (18 per 1000).3 Yet these raw figures are misleading. A majority of Jamaica's white population was men in their twenties and thirties. One breakdown of population by age and sex that has survived is for long-settled, rural Clarendon Parish in 1788. According to this breakdown, and there is no reason to indicate that this breakdown was anything other than normative, nearly 50% of the population was men between 20 and 40. Occasional tabulations of population suggest that Jamaica contained many more white men than white women. In St. James Parish, on the western frontier, twothirds of the white population in 1774 was adult men able to bear arms. In St. Andrew in 1730, adult males accounted for 58% of the white population. Proportionately more women lived in urban areas than in the countryside but even in the towns men were numerically dominant. Extrapolations from poll tax lists for mid-eighteenth-century Kingston suggest that 40% of the population was adult males. Only in Port Royal in 1738 – an economic backwater – was the number of adult white men and adult white women equal. My guess would be that at least 80% of the white population in the eighteenth century was adults in the prime marrying ages. The percentage of the population that did marry, therefore, was distinctly unimpressive: only 29 marriages in Kingston in 1745, for example, in a town that probably contained between 700 and 900 adult males, most unmarried. Marriage rates are even less impressive when the high rate of remarriage is considered: 50% of marriages were second marriages for at least one partner.4 Over one-third of 444 men leaving wills, or letters of administration, in St Andrew before 1780 died unmarried.5 The proportion of women who did not marry is more difficult to determine but 58% of 660 women dying in Kingston between 1753 and 1774 were either spinsters or widows.6 Migrants to Jamaica were especially likely to remain unmarried. Bryan Edwards, an unmarried late eighteenthcentury historian, noted that migrants usually considered ‘a family as an incumbrance,’ and that marriage was ‘held in but little estimation’ (Edwards, 1793, vol. 1, p. 227). Wealthy bachelors were common. Edwards inherited his Jamaican property from his unmarried uncle, Zachary Bayly (1720–1769), who died worth £114,743 sterling.7 Perhaps even wealthier was another Kingston merchant, Thomas Hibbert, who arrived in Jamaica in 1734 and who died, without direct heirs, in 1780. Maria Nugent wrote of Simon Taylor, the richest man in Jamaica by the early nineteenth century, that he was ‘an old bachelor’ who ‘detests the society of women’ and who ‘has a numerous family of mulattoes some almost on every one of his estates’ (Wright, 1966, p. 68). Britons of lower social status arriving in Jamaica were also unlikely to marry. Of 1722 male servants sent from London to Jamaica between 1719 and 1759, only ten can be proven to have married. (Wilson, 1987–93) The institution of marriage in Jamaica was in a perilous condition for two reasons. First, mortality was so extraordinarily high that few marriages lasted very long, remarriage was frequent, and children produced in marriages usually either died young or were quickly orphaned (Burnard, 1994; idem, 1999). But another factor was the low esteem in which white Jamaican men held marriage. By openly living with black or coloured women, by condoning very high rates of illegitimacy among the white as well as the black population, otherwise virtuous Jamaican men laid themselves open to charges of ‘creolian degeneracy.’ If they continued such practices, warned the Jamaican patriot Edward Long, Jamaicans would slip into the moral torpor that Long believed distinguished Spanish America (Long,

3 The 1673 Census is in Add. Mss. 18,273, Long MSS., British Library. The 1730 Census is in C.O. 137/19 (pt. 2)/48. Marriages are abstracted from the St. Andrew, St. Catherine, and Kingston Marriage Registers. 4 Census of Clarendon Parish, 1788, C.O. 137/87, National Archives, Kew, London; Census of St. James, 1774, “Statistics of Jamaica, 1739– 1775,” Long Papers Add. Mss. 12,435, British Museum; Census of St. Andrew, 1730, Calendar of State Papers: Colonial Series, America and the West Indies, 1574–1737, 44 vols., (Vaduz, Liecht., 1964; orig. pub. 1860), 1730, 37, No.311, sec. xii; Census of Households, Port Royal Vestry Records, 1738, IB 2/19/1; Poll Tax, Kingston, 1745, Kingston Vestry Records, IB 2/6/1, Jamaica Archives, Spanishtown, Jamaica. 5 Wills, 1666–1780, vols. 1–40, Island Record Office, Twickenham, Jamaica. 6 Kingston Death Register, Island Armoury. 7 Inventories 50/166 (1769), 52/58, 69 (1770), Inventories, 1B/11/3, Jamaica Archives.

T. Burnard / History of the Family 11 (2006) 185–197

189

1774, vol. 2, p. 327). By mocking the sacrament of marriage, therefore, white Jamaicans were laying the seeds of their own decline, a decline that even their legendary prosperity could not halt. 2. Immorality and concubinage If British Americans hoped that their societies were improving, they feared that increasing vice compromised improvement. Liberty and prosperity could be guaranteed only if citizens were virtuous. Virtuous citizens were independent, public spirited and manly defenders of the public welfare against effete aristocratic excess. But the activities and integrity of virtuous citizens could be undermined if men became addicted to luxury, magnificence, and vice and thus susceptible to the lures of corrupt men bent on establishing tyrannical rule (Greene, 1993a,b; Pocock, 1985). In the colonies, moral rather than political corruption was what most worried commentators. British Americans were particularly sensitive to accusations that they were morally degenerate, people who retained the character of the original European settlers to the Americas, whom Europeans often described in contemptuous terms. Such charges caused most concern from about 1730 onwards, as colonials strove to prove that their societies were successfully improved and anglicised variants of British societies (Greene, 1970). In no colony was evidence of vice, luxury, or immorality so striking as in Jamaica. Even the planters' greatest advocate, Edward Long, was forced to admit that planters were indolent, intemperate, promiscuous, and over fond of luxury (Long, 1774, vol.2, pp. 265–6). The most damning sign of Jamaican immorality was whites' open tolerance of concubinage. Their fondness for illicit love demonstrated that Jamaican men were not in control of their inner impulses and were, in fact, slaves to satisfying their most base lusts. People incapable of self-control over their passions were also incapable of the civic virtue necessary to assure liberty. Somewhat ironically, given their penchant for virile heterosexual libertinism, Jamaican men's inability to resist sexual temptation showed an ‘extravagant submission’ to women that could be seen in this discourse as proof of effeminacy. Jamaican men were in thrall to womanly wiles, which made them like women themselves (Wilson, 1995, pp. 219–25). When white writers condemned Jamaican men for not marrying and for attaching themselves to coloured mistresses, they couched their reproaches in terms of white male weakness and black female aggressiveness.8 Edward Long's argument was typical: when a white man, through weakness of flesh, succumbed to feminine charms, he became an ‘abject, passive slave’ to his black mistress's ‘insults, thefts, and infidelities’ (Long, 1774, vol. 2, p. 327). Commentators were anxious to show that white men–those most responsible for the loose sexual climate of Jamaica– were not to blame for their actions. White men, masterful everywhere else, were powerless when in the clutches of conniving mulatto and black women. Black women were scheming Jezebels, ‘hot constitution'd Ladies’ possessed of a ‘temper hot and lascivious, making no scruple to prostitute themselves to Europeans for a very slender profit, so great is their inclination to white men’ (Bush, 1990; Smith, 1744, p. 146). Attempts to absolve white men from responsibility for their actions, however, raised a question for people who thought of such matters within a discourse of virtue: did Jamaican men have enough self-control to be worthy of self-government? Jamaican men's failure to marry, their addiction to vice, and their seeming dependence on women of dubious virtue did not just hinder population growth. Such derelictions were a sign of the moral degeneracy that eighteenth-century writers knew would condemn peoples and states to internal decay and external disaster (Brown, 2006; Greene, 2000; Wood, 2002). Criticism of Jamaicans' low esteem for marriage was not new. Seventeenth-century writers noted that marriage was not highly regarded. John Taylor commented that ‘the rude and common sort…seldom marie according to the Ceremony of the Church but are so full of faith as to take one another's words, and so live together and beget children (Taylor, 1690). Taylor did not condemn such informal arrangements but others did. Edward Ward, for example, author of a scurrilous tract on his purported trip to Jamaica, took such informal marriage arrangements to be proof that Jamaica was a new Sodom where the men were rogues and the women strumpets (Ward, 1698, p. 16). Ward merely embellished on older denigration of Europeans in the tropics put forward by Richard Ligon and Henry Whistler. As Whistler put it, the English West Indies was ‘the dunghill upon whereon England doth cast its rubbish,’ a place populated by ‘rogues and whores and such like people.’ The morals of the island were so loose that ‘a rogue in England will hardly make a cheater here’ and a bawd and a whore was thought demure and a suitable partner, ‘if handsome,’ for a wealthy planter (Firth, 1900, pp. 146–47; Ligon, 1657). Even pro-planter writers agreed that debauchery reigned in the islands. Taylor, 8

For an interesting case study of white female aggressiveness that should be counter posed to this narrative, see the treatment of Teresia Constantia Phillips in Wilson, 2003, pp.129–68.

190

T. Burnard / History of the Family 11 (2006) 185–197

for example, admitted that Port Royal ‘is very lose in itself,’ being full of ‘Privateers and debauched wild blades ... [and] vile strumpets and common prostitutes.’ The town was a ‘Sodom fill with all manner of Debauchery’ that was so ‘infected’ with vice ‘that it is almost impossible to civillize it’ (Taylor, 1690). Nevertheless, Taylor's condemnation of Jamaican excesses was part of a general discourse decrying colonial deficiencies. Colonies everywhere in the late seventeenth century remained crude, simple, and barbaric in the eyes of metropolitan observers. Taylor mimicked the New England minister, Cotton Mather, in worrying about what Mather called ‘Creolean degeneracy,’ even if, in Jamaica, such ‘degeneracy’ was more visible than in Massachusetts (Greene, 1993). As Bernard Bailyn notes, life in most of seventeenth century British America was ‘literally barbarous,’ and that the politics of the region was ‘characterised by authorized brutality without restraint … [and] the exuberant desecration of the symbols of civility.’ The planters of the West India may have been debauched people who turned their tropical paradises into disastrous social failures, as Richard Dunn memorably described them, but they were not much more advanced than their Puritan contemporaries who made their colonies wastelands of savagery in America's most destructive War, King Philip's War, in the mid-1670s. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, those early deficiencies were beginning to be remedied. Colonists in North America were much less defensive than they had been about the social distance between themselves and Europeans. As Adam Smith noted in 1776, there were ‘no colonies of which the progress has been more rapid than that of the English in North America.’ There was, he argued, ‘not a single person who foresaw’ in the late seventeenth century ‘the rapid progress which they have since made in wealth, population, and improvement’ (Bailyn, 2005, pp. 63–4; Campbell & Skinner, 1976–83, vol. 2, pp. 567, 571–98; Dunn, 1972, p. 340; Pulsipher, 2005). Writing at virtually the same time as Smith, the historian Edward Long also castigated the mores of Jamaica's rough frontier society in the seventeenth century and argued that matters had improved in the eighteenth century. In the past, he admitted, ‘the married men and bachelors used to carouse together almost every day at taverns...and the name of a family man was held in the utmost derision.’ Now, he asserted, polite society was more common. Long was easily the best commentator on eighteenth-century Jamaica, offering a cogent analysis of planter society and the role of marriage in maintaining planter power. But his bias in favour of planters and blindness to their faults was nearly as pronounced as his extreme Negrophobia and anti-Semitism. The portrait he paints of Creole planters–‘of quick apprehension, goodnatured, affable, generous, temperate, and sober … lovers of freedom … tender fathers, humane and indulgent masters; firm and sincere friends'–is contradicted at nearly every point by external evidence (Long, 1774, vol.2, pp. 262, 281). The extensive diaries of Thomas Thistlewood reveal white Jamaican men to be violent, quick to anger, cruel to their slaves, sexually avaricious, drink-sozzled, and irredeemably boorish (Burnard, 2004). Yet even Long recognised that planters were not paragons of virtue. He lamented, in particular, white men's weak commitment to marriage, which he thought would greatly hinder future social improvement. Jamaican men had ‘a strong natural propensity to the other sex’ making them ‘not always the most chaste and faithful of husbands.’ In an evocative and revealing phrase, he condemned Jamaican men for their attachments to black and coloured mistresses: ‘In a place where, by custom, so little restraint is laid on the passions, many are the men, of every rank, quality and degree here, who would much rather riot in these goatish embraces, than share the pure and lawful bliss derived from matrimonial, mutual love.' In Jamaica, Long argued, ‘the Europeans, who at home have always been used to greater purity and strictness of manners, are too easily led aside to give a loose to every kind of sensual delight: on this account some black or yellow quasheba is fought for, by whom a tawney breed is produced.’ Long imagined these ‘quashebas’ as possessing almost superhuman sexual powers. ‘In her well-dissembled affection, in her tricks, cajolements and infidelities,’ he expounded, the black woman ‘is far more perfectly versed than any adept of the hundreds of Drury’ (Long, 1774, vol. 2., pp. 13, 281, 328, 331). 3. The charms of black women Long's Negrophobia and belief in the essential bestiality of Africans made it difficult for him to comprehend why white men found African women attractive. Other whites were more forthcoming. John Stedman, an Englishman in late eighteenth-century Surinam, waxed lyrical about the beauty of his mulatto mistress, Joanna. Her face, he asserted, ‘was full of native modesty,’ her colour was fetching, and her features were ‘perfectly well-formed.’ West Indians were occasionally moved to write verse celebrating the beauty of black women; the most famous being the ‘Ode to the Sable Venus,’ composed by the Reverend Isaac Teale in 1765 and published in Bryan Edwards' 1793 history. For Teale, the black woman represented forbidden but easily accessible sensual pleasures. In his heavily eroticised prose, the white man sought the ‘sable queen's … gentle reign … where meeting love, sincere delight, fond pleasure, ready joys invite,

T. Burnard / History of the Family 11 (2006) 185–197

191

and unbrought rapture meet.' Long's image of the bestial woman and Teale's description of the black woman as eternally erotic shared a conviction that black women were sexually irresistible. Black women's earthy animal sensuality and immodesty made them sexually insatiable and their lasciviousness encouraged them to acquire a plenitude of erotic skills (Bush, 1990, pp. 11–18, 110–17; Edwards, 1794; Price & Price, 1988, pp. 87–89). Infidelity was also connected to the climate. The author of The Jamaican Lady (1720) assumed that a tropical climate induced unfaithfulness. He noted that the hero of his tale had caught his wife ‘tripping at Jamaica’ but ‘that was not the Fault of the Woman as of the Climate’ which ‘so changes the Constitution of its Inhabitants that if a woman land there as chaste as a Vestal, she becomes in forty eight Hours a perfect Messalina.’(Pittism, 1720, p. 35) Long echoed these assumptions in a history greatly informed by an all-embracing meteorological determinism. Because of the climate, he believed, ‘men are more feelingly alive to joy and inquietude’ because ‘the nervous system is far more irritable than in a Northern climate.’ Consequently, men were stirred more quickly to ‘sudden and violent emotions of the mind,' explaining their passion for black women (Kupperman, 1984; Long, 1774; vol. 2, p. 267, vol. 3, pp. 542–43; Mulcahy, 2006). Heightened passions, combined with the enervating tropical climate, also made for weak religious attachment and easy acceptance of immorality. The link between white Jamaican's irreligiousity and their unbridled sexuality was noted from an early date. Governors regularly lamented the poor state of the church in Jamaica, which they partly blamed on the ‘notorious profligate and Vitious Life and Conversation’ of clergymen, a charge echoed in Charles Leslie's 1740 history, where he described the clergy, ‘except a few,’ as ‘the most finish'd of our Debauchees.’9 One effect of living in ‘these Sultry Climes,’ a clergyman noted in 1728, was that the ‘Constitution of Men's Bodies’ was so altered as ‘to wear off … all Sense of Religion.’ Soon, newcomers became inured to the daily cruelties inflicted on slaves and quickly learned Jamaican sexual habits. For native-born whites, the clergyman suggested, dissolution arose from the close intimacy between children and black nurses. Children, ‘suckled and brought up’ by black women' contract as they grow up ‘an Intimacy and Openness’ inimical to sexual purity; they copied the ‘loose and Shameless Behaviour of these Creatures whom no Modesty, natural to the Sex, debars from satisfying the brutish Appetites of their Young masters.’ Clerical condemnation was little heeded. The Reverend William May, rector at Kingston for forty years, replied to the Bishop of London in 1733 that the chances of trying to get a law passed against slave concubinage were low. He cited the comments of the speaker of the late Assembly, who ‘thought People ought to be encouraged or Rewarded for begetting Mulattoes and that That was the best way to people the Island.’ Such an iniquitous statement, May believed, was especially scandalous given the expense of ‘subduing Rebellious Negroes’ and ‘made me think that God Almighty make use of them [the rebellious negroes] as Instruments to Punish the People of this island for that Scandalous and detestable vice of keeping Negro Concubines.’10 The pull of black women was accompanied for some whites by a push away from white women. Maynard Clarke, a wealthy Creole educated in Britain and recently returned to his considerable estate in St Andrew, offered the following opinion of his countrywomen in a letter to a college friend in 1749. The ‘few who have had an English Education’ are ‘really pretty tolerable’, he stated, but ‘the Girls in the Country are absolutely mere Gawkins.’ Clarke regaled his friend with a description of his visit to a country estate. The mistress eagerly paraded her three young daughters before him. Clarke offered one a glass of wine but the girl refused: ‘she drop'd an awkward Courtsy and said no thanking me no I never drink wine here Quasheba bring some Callabash water [She had] so wild an Appearance that I really began to think whether she was not a Negro painted white.’ In the evening Clarke had ‘the pleasure’ of ‘sitting out with my fair one in Company with a Creature much like herself to whom she was going to be joined in holy matrimony.’ Matrimony, he noted, was ‘a fashion little followed here keeping being reckoned rather more polite.’11 Given his low opinion of the charms of Creole ladies, it is no surprise that Clarke eschewed marriage. The rich heir of a family who had been in Jamaica since the conquest of 1655, he died in 1760, unmarried but with a mulatto daughter who inherited a legacy of £5000.12 Creole women had their defenders. By the mid-eighteenth century, few writers thought white women naturally unfaithful. As in the American South, the status of white women changed as the plantation system matured. The seventeenth century description of white women as sexually licentiousness gave way to a discourse in which all but the 9

Governor A. Hamilton to Bishop Robinson, 22 March, 1713/14; Duke of Portland to H. Newman, 4 March, 1723/24, The Fulham papers in the Lambeth Palace Library: American Colonial Section, vol. XVII, 107–10, 171–72; Leslie, 1740, p. 319. 10 G. (Marquis) Duqusene to (Henry) Newman, 15 May, 1728; William May to Bishop Gibson, 11 April, 1733. Fulham Papers, XVII, 248–59. 11 Maynard Clarke to Revd. Mr. Blocker, 20 July 1749, Letterbook of Maynard Clarke, 1749–1759, C.104/8 Walter vs. Evans, 1782, National Archives. 12 Wills 32/115 (1760), Island Record Office.

192

T. Burnard / History of the Family 11 (2006) 185–197

poorest white women were treated as icons of propriety. This virtue was achieved, however, less by intrinsic goodness than by the all-enveloping social proscription on female infidelity, especially infidelity with black men. John Stedman summed up the options open to a white woman. Although she had to tolerate her menfolk's sexual wanderings, ‘should it be known that any European female had an intercourse with a slave of any denomination,’ the woman ‘is forever detested and the slave loses his life without mercy—such are the despotic laws of men over the weaker sex’ (Price & Price, 1988, p. 242). Even if women's chastity was socially imposed, some contemporaries saw it as virtuous. Patrick Browne celebrated white women as ‘great lovers of decency and cleanliness, always sprightly and goodhumoured, naturally modest, genteel and lovers of mirth.’ Edward Long also praised planter women for their good looks, cleanliness, affection towards their children, feminine accomplishments, and chastity. But the truth of some of Maynard Clarke's observations about the social deficiencies of Creole women had to be admitted. Browne agreed that white women were known ‘both for their indolence and for their want of consideration; which too often deters the gentlemen in these colonies from entering into the matrimonial state.’ He admitted that white women would have to be ‘most engaging’ to break Jamaican men of ‘those vicious habits...their great attachments to Negroe women’ (Browne, 1756, pp. 23–4). In a remarkable passage, one of the most revealing in his history, Long castigated white Creole ladies for imitating their black domestics. He painted a portrait of these women intended to horrify — a fine young woman ‘awkwardly dangling her arms with the air of a Negroe-servant, lolling almost the whole day upon beds or settees…gobbling pepper-pot, seated on the floor, with her sable hand-maids around her.’ Her speech was ‘whining, languid and childish’ while her ideas were ‘narrowed to the ordinary subjects that pass before her, the business of the plantation, the tittle-tattle of the parish; the tricks, superstitions, diversions, and profligate discourses, of black servants, equally illiterate and unpolished.’ Long’s comments on white women were a manifestation of his fear that Jamaican society was becoming Africanized rather than Europeanised. White women were not to be blamed for their inadequacies, he thought, but were to be pitied as they had ‘been bred entirely in the sequestered country parts, and had no opportunity of forming themselves either by example or tuition.’ African cultural influences were so pervasive that whites who had not experienced the bracing air of intellectual and social life in Britain could not avoid the taint of constant intercourse with Africans. Cultivated gentlemen like the English-educated Maynard Clarke would not be attracted to such indolent and Africanized creatures.13 Yet to respond, like Clarke, and take a coloured mistress, was, as Long recognised, socially disastrous. White men needed to be encouraged to marry in order to ensure that Jamaica became a ‘polite’ society. Because they did not marry, Long contended, Jamaica had ‘more spinsters…in this small community, than in most other parts of his majesty’s dominions.’ More seriously, white men's ‘infatuated attachments to black women’ led to ‘a vast addition of spurious offspring of different complexions.’ The continuation of such practices, Long warned, would lead to dreadful social decline: ‘Let any man turn his eyes to the Spanish American dominions, and behold what a vicious, brutal, and degenerate breed of mongrels has been there produced, between Spaniards, Blacks, Indians, and their mixed progeny.’ In order to avoid this, men had to ‘perform the duty incumbent on every good citizen, by raising in honourable wedlock a race of unadulterated beings.’ Long placed some of the blame for the low rate of white marriages on men who offered ‘trite pretenses’ such as ‘heavy and intolerable expenses’ for not marrying. But for Long women were mainly to blame for their continued spinsterhood. Creole women needed to make themselves into women Maynard Clarke would want to marry. In short, they needed to become ‘more companionable, useful and esteemable as wives, than the Negresses and Mulattos are as mistresses.’ So that ‘the Ladies themselves’ might ‘rescue this truly honourable union from that fashionable detestation in which it seems to be held’, they must cultivate a ‘modest demeanour.’ Long argued that their deficiencies could only be corrected through education. A strong critic of the absence of schools on the island, Long urged Jamaicans to provide schools for planters' sons and a seminary for planters' daughters. Women's education was to be firmly practical. Girls were to learn ‘reading, writing, arithmetic, needlework, dancing, and music’ so that they could become ‘good wives and mothers’ A seminary would be especially useful, Long thought, in allowing girls to ‘be weaned from the Negroe dialect, improved by emulation, and gradually habituated to a modest and polite behaviour.’ Long also attacked men's infatuation with their coloured mistresses. Moral suasion, he realised, was impossible: anyone who condemned as morally reprehensible ‘such a thing as simple fornication, would for his pains be accounted 13

The reality of white women's lives in Jamaica was, of course, far removed from what male contemporaries imagined. For women in Kingston, see Burnard, 2006 and idem, 2002.

T. Burnard / History of the Family 11 (2006) 185–197

193

a simple blockhead.’ ‘Not one in twenty,’ he continued ‘can be persuaded that there is either sin; or shame in cohabitating with his slave.’ Instead, planters needed to be attacked through their pocketbook. Long suggested that every mulatto child be freed. This policy would ‘repress the tendency of planters to fornicate with slaves’ as freeing slaves ‘would deprive planters of part of their property.’ But Long was certainly no advocate of racial equality. Mulatto children were to be freed but to be kept in poverty. He applauded the 1761 Act of the Jamaica legislature that restricted what mulatto children could inherit, principally because he thought such restrictions on the testamentary freedom of white men would make legitimate marriages more appealing (Long, 1774, vol. 2, pp. 249–50, 279–80, 323–38). Legislators agreed. Lovell Stanhope, Jamaica's agent in London, made this clear in his representation supporting the Bill to the Board of Trade. After detailing the generous bequests that white men gave to coloured children – bequests that made coloured descendants of wealthy men very attractive companions for white men – Stanhope argued that restricting such bequests was necessary to limit the ‘unlawful commerce with Negro slaves; which habit reconciles and numbers sanctify.’ The bill was necessary in ‘order to encourage the legal propagation of children by Marriage’ and to induce whites, ‘especially Managers of estates and tradesmen,’ to marry and ‘leave [the] fruits of their Industry to those who will become useful members of society.’ Such prohibitions were a salutary reminder also for ‘the higher class…to whom the knowledge of this law will be necessary.’ Stanhope finished with a flourish: ‘The law is inconsistent with licentiousness but surely very compatible with liberty, it promotes chastity and the rites of marriage.’ The 1761 Act limiting mulatto inheritances offered a new twist on familiar obsessions of white Jamaicans. For forty years, legislators had tried to increase white settlement though attracting family groups. The promotion of settlement was more central than reducing licentiousness.14 The ‘extream heat’ of the climate, Stanhope argued, made the few women who went to Jamaica ‘worn out’ and ‘less amiable’ than they would be in a more temperate zone. Women's ennui promoted white men's ‘unlawful commerce with Negro slaves,’ Stanhope lectured the Board of Trade. The passing of an act limiting mulatto inheritances would, in some unspecified way, be ‘one means of increasing the number of white inhabitants.’ Stanhope thought that when Jamaicans devised ‘their Estates to spurious progeny,’ it was both a sign of moral degeneracy and a step towards ‘the disinherision of lawful heirs and the destruction of families.’ Presumably, men's natural urge to pass down their property to their own flesh would promote marriage rather than concubinage if the offspring of concubines could not inherit. If marriage among whites was not encouraged, Stanhope predicted direly, Jamaica would soon become a brown rather than a white-controlled society. As ‘Power ever follows property,’ whites would find it impossible to deny wealthy coloureds political power. Once that occurred, the laws of colour, which alone maintained the security of the island, ‘must be repealed, the Power will then be in their hands, and the Island become a colony of Negroes and Mulattoes.’ Coloured people with property and power indicated social and moral decline. Such decline was already in evidence, Stanhope believed, in the opposition raised ‘ag'st this Salutory Law,’ opposition he attributed to the baneful influence of female mulattoes over ‘dissolute minds.’ If this Act was not passed, Stanhope warned, like Long, ‘All distinction of Colour will at least [sic] be levelled, and the Inhabitants of Jamaica, like their Neighbours the American Spaniards, will, too probably, become one day a People without Spirit, Religion or Morality.’15 The Board of Trade was convinced; the Act was allowed to stand, despite its abridgment of testamentary freedom and its departures from standard British law. Stanhope might have added that this Act was just one of several measures considered by the legislature to enhance European settlement. Other measures included placing a super-tax on absentees and passing a law to allow people to claim lands owned by absentees that were patented but not cultivated. In 1762, this law was put to the test, in an action condoned by the Assembly, when a Jamaican resident squatted on uncultivated lands owned by the richest and most conspicuous absentee, London's Lord Mayor, William Beckford.16 The 1761 Act, however, heralded a significant change of legislative direction. Previously, Assemblies had spent considerable sums of money to bring settlers to Jamaica. Governor Knowles, a vociferous critic, estimated that as much as £30,000 had been spent before his arrival in 1753 on bringing 700 families to Jamaica.17 By the late 1750s, however, the Assembly recognised that settlement schemes did not work. They reluctantly accepted, for example, that an act of 1750 that gave a bounty to white 14

No attempt was made to punish white men for propagating mulatto bastards although in 1776 the Assembly did contemplate bringing in a bill to lay a tax upon all bachelors over the age of 21, hoping to attack concubinage and reward marriage through this means. Journals of the House of the Assembly of Jamaica 14 vols. (Kingston, 1803–26) 27 November, 1776, VI: 661. 15 Stanhope to Board of Trade, 13 June 1761, C.O. 137/33/34–43, National Archives. 16 William Beckford vs. Samuel Jeake, Add. Mss. 36,219, Hardwicke Papers, ff. 168–209. The judgment went in Beckford's favour. 17 Charles Knowles to the Board of Trade, 3 December 1754, C.O. 137/28/43.

194

T. Burnard / History of the Family 11 (2006) 185–197

tradesmen who migrated to the island was ruinously expensive and ineffective.18 Although whites continued to believe until at least the American Revolution that the number of whites in Jamaica could be greatly increased, they now rejected expensive settlement schemes. It was a short step from accepting that settlement schemes did not work to accepting that the level of white population in the island would not be large. Moreover, the major impact of the 1761 Act was to discourage the growth of a wealthy mulatto population. Nothing in the Act, despite Stanhope's protestations to the contrary, encouraged the migration of white women or white families into Jamaica. As the rapid growth in the number of freed persons after 1760 attests, the Act did little to discourage concubinage. Its major effect was to prevent members of the growing class of free blacks and coloureds from attaining wealth and prosperity. White male sexual adventuring was both commonplace and socially accepted. Commentators noted that for a man to live in open concubinage or to sexually molest his slaves was hardly a matter for social condemnation. As Maria Nugent observed in 1801, ‘no man is here without … [a] chere amie.’ She lamented the fate of ‘an unfortunate wife’ whose husband's attachment to a brown mistress ‘had occasioned his treating her often with the greatest cruelty ever’ (Wright, 1966, pp. 29, 82). Twenty years later, John Stewart confirmed that the general licentiousness of white men went unremarked and that white women would even visit the mistresses of unmarried white men and ‘think it no breach of decorum to converse’ with her, as if ‘that conduct which they regarded as so disgraceful in their own class, was not so in the female of colour.’ ‘The man who lives in open adultery,’ he added, ‘has generally as much outward respect shown him … as if he had been guilty of no breach of delicacy or dereliction of moral duty!’ (Stewart, 1823, pp. 173–74) As the vast majority of the female population was black and as their charms were reputed to be considerable, it is not surprising that white men chose ‘open and avowed concubinage’ with black women rather than marriage (Cooper, 1824, p. 8). White Jamaicans' sexual practices have a decidedly modern ring: cohabitation before marriage was common; de facto as opposed to de jure marriages were frequent; and marital infidelity was reputed to be so prevalent as to be of little moment (Moreton, 1793, p. 107). Rich and poor alike entered into de facto relationships on a regular basis, both with slaves and with unmarried white women. Nearly one-quarter of white children baptised in Kingston between 1722 and 1749 were illegitimate. Among the fathers of illegitimate children were leading merchants John Drinkwater, Nathaniel Phillips, Councillor Edmund Hyde, and Clarendon planter Valentine Mumbee. Mumbee, indeed, was so unrepentant about his cohabitation with a white woman that he made a fervent defence of his reluctance to marry in his will. Mumbee fathered a child out of wedlock with Alhemiah Davenport in 1735 but by 1741 was living with Mrs. Elizabeth Warden. In his will, he stated ‘I have for some time lived [with Warden] as with a wife.’ He bequeathed Mrs. Warden £150 per annum as long as she was unmarried and had no other children besides his. Mumbee justified his actions as being consistent with the views of ‘Divines and Casuists that the essence of Matrimony consists in a union of minds and mutual fidelity’ rather than ‘in external ceremonies and publick forms.’ Indeed, Mumbee proclaimed his moral superiority over ‘weak’ people who needed to be married because they ‘will not govern themselves by divine precepts.’ Mumbee, however, took ‘all Virtues to be the more valuable as they are the more Voluntary.’ As Mrs. Warden had ‘not deviated from these essential points that constitute a marriage,’ Mumbee felt obliged to give her the support that she would have been entitled if they had been legally married.19 Such freethinking was common in mid-eighteenth century Jamaica. Neither the clergy nor respectable women avoided men who openly kept mistresses; they may have been willing to mingle with the concubines themselves. While by 1800 the colour bar had tightened sufficiently to render it socially impossible for a white man to marry a coloured woman, in mid-century the colour bar was less rigid. The rector of St. Catherine insisted in 1751 that ‘White People of Reputation never marry but White Women’ but an intriguing conversation among white men reported by slave overseer Thomas Thistlewood's nephew, John, in 1765, suggests that white men of lower status may have been less discerning about colour. ‘The subject of our discourse at dinner was about getting a wife,’ John commented. The consensus was ‘that it did not signify what Coller a woman was of provided she had a good fortune and a Virtous woman.’ Emboldened by this discussion John resolved to ‘go and se Miss Kunningham [Cunningham]’ even though ‘she is a mulatto.’ ‘Miss Kunningham’ was one of the rich mulatto women specifically targeted in the 1761 legislation limiting mulatto inheritances. John drowned before he could undertake his resolution, but his report of this conversation

18 19

Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 13 November, 1758, V: 93. Mumbee's child died in 1738, aged two and a half, Kingston Parish Register. Mumbee's will is abstracted in “Abstracts of Jamaica Wills.”

T. Burnard / History of the Family 11 (2006) 185–197

195

suggests a surprising openness to interracial marriage by white men when a mulatto woman was, like ‘Miss Kunningham,’ a woman of wealth and education.20 4. The ideological consequences of infrequent marriage If little evidence explains why white men were reluctant to marry, almost nothing survives detailing female preferences. John Stedman assumed that white women in the Caribbean were desperate to marry but the number of women who died as widows, long after their husbands' deaths and the number of women who gave birth to illegitimate children suggest otherwise. In the countryside, propertied women may have felt considerable pressure to remarry. Mary Elbridge, left a widow in 1727, complained that her plantation was too great a responsibility for her. Feeling that she had ‘been used with a Great deal of ingratitude,’ by her relatives she argued that she found the plantation too difficult to run by herself, especially given ‘the troble and vexation of negros.’21 Controlling slaves required a strong physical presence and may have encouraged women in rural areas to remarry. In the towns, women were less willing to remarry. Common occupations for female town-dwellers included tavern keeping, hiring out slaves, brothel-keeping, petty shopkeeping, and huckstering. None of these occupations specifically required male support. Indeed, women in such occupations may have done so because their inheritances were not so generous as to enable them, like Sybella Sigler, to remarry advantageously. A woman left with an estate only for widowhood, for example, had a strong incentive not to marry. Remaining single or cohabitating were in these cases sensible options (Beckles, 1993, p. 71; Burnard, 2006). These casual approaches to marriage sound reasonable to modern sensibilities. But what appears rational to present day observers appeared grossly immoral to contemporaries. Until the last decade of the eighteenth century, criticism of Jamaica's failure to conform to European conceptions of proper marital relations focused on how these irregular relationships hindered colonisation and white settlement. After the beginning of widespread antislavery agitation in Britain, however, the sexual practices of white Jamaican men were attacked from a different, and more dangerous direction. The licentiousness of Jamaican men was now evidence that a society based on slavery promoted godlessness. For abolitionists, the essence of slavery was the unlimited and arbitrary power that slaveholders exerted over helpless slaves. While slavery brutalised slaves, it also corrupted slaveholders, making them unrestrained, morally vicious, irreligious, and socially backward. Slavery was the embodiment of the sin that evangelicals wished to purge from the world and slaveholders were depicted as the living representation of vice. Evangelicals especially emphasised two slaveholder vices: their shameful inattention to religion and their remarkable sexual licentiousness. As one writer put it, ‘Fornication, and adultery are reigning sins in this region.’ In 1832, John Baillie admitted before a parliamentary committee that after twenty-seven years in Jamaica he could not name a single overseer or bookkeeper that did not possess a mistress. Moreover, some attorneys kept a mistress on every estate, touring their estates to indulge in ‘orgies of fornication.’ For evangelicals, devotion to the sanctity of the family and to marital fidelity were the highest of virtues. Europeans' sexual licentiousness in the Caribbean was emblematic of West Indians' poor social and political character. That character featured abuse of power, lack of self-restraint, and personal intemperance. It was a short step from condemning planters' moral bankruptcy to condemning the social system that they had created as socially indefensible and economically unprogressive (Brown, 2006, p. 74; Davis, 1984, pp. 107–67; Drescher, 2002; Higman, 1976, p. 143; Holt, 1992, pp. 91–94; Shyllon, 1977, pp. 2–13). The failure of Jamaicans to marry with sufficient regularity thus had major ideological consequences. In the seventeenth century, Jamaicans deviation from accustomed European marital norms indicated the degree to which Jamaica was an uncivil place on the distant margins of civilisation. By the mid-eighteenth century, the failure of Jamaican men to marry was both an indictment of the extent of improvement in the island and a worrying sign that Jamaica was destined not to be a land full of white settlers. By the early nineteenth century, when Jamaicans were very much on the defensive against metropolitan attacks on the institution that held their social system together, their aberrant attitudes to sex and marriage fuelled a discourse about the immorality of slavery. The dismal failure of Europeans to create a viable society in the tropics confirmed abolitionists' arguments about the evil effects of such immorality. The fond hopes of Edward Long, that Jamaica would become a socially improved place, had not been 20

John Venn to Bishop Sherlock, 15 June, 1751, Fulham Papers, vol. XVIII, 47; 23 February, 1765, Diary of John Thistlewood, Monson 31/38, Monson Deposit, Lincolnshire County Archives, Lincoln. 21 Mary Elbridge to Henry Woolnough, 19 June and 22 November, 1739, Spring Plantation records, 16 (17) e and g; Smyth MSS, AC/WO 16, Bristol Record Office, Bristol.

196

T. Burnard / History of the Family 11 (2006) 185–197

realised, in part because white Jamaicans continued to prefer ‘rioting in goatish embraces’ to ‘the pure and lawful bliss’ of matrimony. That improvement was handicapped by immorality continued to be an obsession of white Jamaicans until the end of slavery. John Stewart, the most acute of the early nineteenth century observers on Jamaica, noted, for example, in words that echoed Long that ‘improvement was impossible while the most gross licentiousness continues to prevail among all ranks of whites’ (Stewart, 1823, pp. 169–73). Jamaicans' inability to conform to European notions of a decent, settled, and improved society continued to dog Jamaicans throughout the period of slavery. References Atwood, T. (1791). The history of the island of Dominica. London. Bailyn, B. (2005). Atlantic history: Concept and contours. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Beckles, H. (1993). White women and slavery in the Caribbean. History Workshop Journal, 36, 66−82. Brown, C. (2006). Moral capital: Foundations of British abolitionism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Browne, P. (1756). The civil and natural history of Jamaica. London. Burnard, T. (1994). A failed settler society: Marriage and demographic failure in early Jamaica. Journal of Social History, 28, 63−82. Burnard, T. (1999). The countrie continues sicklie': White mortality in Jamaica, 1655–1780. Social History of Medicine, 12, 45−72. Burnard, T. (2002). A matron in rank, a prostitute in manners …': The manning divorce of 1741 and class, race, gender, and the law in EighteenthCentury Jamaica. In V. Shepherd (Ed.), Working out slavery, pricing freedom: Perspectives from the Caribbean, Africa and the African Diaspora (pp. 133−152). Kingston: Ian Randle. Burnard, T. (2004). Mastery, tyranny, and desire: Thomas Thistlewood and his slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Burnard, T. (2006). Gay and agreeable ladies': White women in mid-eighteenth century Kingston, Jamaica. Wadabagei, 9, 27−49. Bush, B. (1990). Slave women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Campbell, R. H. & Skinner, A. S. (Eds.). (1976–83). The Glasgow Edition of the works and correspondence of Adam Smith, Vol. 6.Oxford: Oxford University Press. Canizares-Esguerra, J. (2001). How to write the history of the new world: Histories, epistemologies, and identities in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chinard, G. (1947). Eighteenth-century theories on America as a human habitat. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 91, 27−57. Cooper, T. (1824). Facts illustrative of the condition of the Negro Slaves in Jamaica. London. Davis, D. B. (1984). Slavery and human progress. New York: Oxford University Press. Drescher, S. (2002). The mighty experiment: Free labor versus slavery in British Emancipation. New York: Oxford University Press. Dunn, R. S. (1972). Sugar and slaves: The rise of the planter class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Edelson, S. M. (2006). Plantation enterprise in colonial South Carolina. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. Edwards, B. (1793). The history, civil and commercial, of the British colonies in the West Indies, Vol. 2. London. Elliott, J. H. (2006). Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492-1830. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fender, S. (1993). Franklin and emigration: The trajectory of use. In J. A. Leo Lemay (Ed.), Reappraising Benjamin Franklin: A bicentennial perspective (pp. 335−346). Newark: Rutgers University Press. Firth, C. H. (Ed.). (1900). The narrative of general venables, with an appendix of papers relating to the expedition to the West Indies and the conquest of Jamaica, 1654–1655 (pp. 146−147). London. Franklin, B. (1959). ‘Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, and c.,’ 1751. In Leonard W. Labaree (Ed.), The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. New Haven: Yale University Press. 27 vols. to date. Greene, J. P. (1970). Search for identity: An interpretation of the meaning of selected patterns of social response in eighteenth-century America. Journal of Social History, 3, 189−224. Greene, J. P. (1985). Independence, improvement, and authority: Toward a framework for understanding the histories of the southern backcountry during the era of the American revolution. In R. Hoffman, T. W. Tate, & P. J. Albert (Eds.), An uncivil war: The southern backcountry during the American revolution (pp. 3−46). Charlottesville, Va: University of Virginia Press. Greene, J. P. (1993). The intellectual construction of America: Exceptionalism and identity from 1492 to 1800. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Greene, J. P. (1993). The concept of virtue in late colonial America. In M. Richard (Ed.), Virtue and interest in the eighteenth-century (pp. 27−54). Bethlehem, Pa. Greene, J. P. (2000). Liberty, slavery and the transformation of British identity in the eighteenth-century West Indies. Slavery & Abolition, 21, 1−31. Higman, B. W. (1976). Slave population and economy in Jamaica 1807-1834. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holt, T. C. (1992). The problem of freedom: Race, labor, and politics in Jamaica and Britain 1832-1938. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Jordan, W. D. (1968). White over Black: American attitudes towards the Negro 1550-1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Knight, F. W. (1978). The Caribbean: The genesis of a fragmented nationalism. New York: Oxford University Press. Kupperman, K. O. (1984). Fear of hot climates in the Anglo–American colonial experience. William and Mary Quarterly, XLI, 215−239 (3d Ser.). Lambert, D. (2005). White creole culture, politics and identity during the age of abolition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leslie, C. (1740). A new and exact account of Jamaica. Edinburgh, [n.d, prob.]. Ligon, R. (1657). A true & exact history of the Island of Barbados ... London.

T. Burnard / History of the Family 11 (2006) 185–197

197

Long, E., The History of Jamaica..., (1774). 3 vols. (London; rpt. 1774). Marsh, B. (2007). Georgia's frontier women: Female fortunes in a southern colony. Athens, Ga: University of Georgia Press. Moreton, J. B. (1793). West India customs and manners... London. Morgan, J. (2004). Laboring women: Reproduction and gender in new world slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mulcahy, M. (2006). Hurricanes and society in the British Greater Caribbean 1624-1783. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pittism, W. (1720). The Jamaican Lady; or the Life of Bavia ... London. Pocock, J. G. A. (1985). Virtue, commerce, and history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Price, R. & Price., S. (Eds.). (1988). Stedman's Surinam: Life in an eighteenth-century slave society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Pulsipher, J. H. (2005). Subjects unto the Same King: Indians, English, and the contest for authority in Colonial New England. Philadelphia. Raphael, D. D. & Macfie, A. L. (Eds.). (1976). Adam Smith: The theory of moral sentiments. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ramsay, J. (1784). An essay on the treatment and conversion of African slaves in the British sugar colonies. London. Shyllon, F. (1977). James Ramsay: The unknown abolitionist. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Smith, W. (1744). A new voyage to Guinea.... London. Stewart, J. (1823). View of the past and present state of Jamaica. Edinburgh. Taylor, J. (1690). Multum in Parvo or Taylors Historie of his life and travells in America and other parts (pp. 505). Kingston, I: Institute of Jamaica [n.d. prob.] Ms. 105. Ward, E. (1698). A trip to Jamaica: With a true character of the people and island. London. Wilson, K. (1995). The sense of the people: Politics, culture and imperialism in England, 1715-1785. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilson, K. (2003). The island race: Englishness, empire and gender in the eighteenth century. London and New York: Routledge. Wilson, P. C. (1987–1993). The complete book of emigrants, 1607-1776. Baltimore. Wood, M. (2002). Slavery, empathy, and pornography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wrigley, E. A., & Schofield, R. S. (1989). The population history of England 1541-1871. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wright, P. (Ed.). (1966). Lady Nugent's journal of her residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805. Kingston: Institute of Jamaica.