May 17thBook Review: A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia

I just recently finished Richard S. Dunn’s A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia.  This book took me over 18 months to finish (see my previous post about it for more detail).  I read some other books start to finish in that time, and I also had my first child, but mostly I took so long to finish this book because it is incredibly detailed.  I love a good non-fiction book, but A Tale of Two Plantations will not turn the pages the way, say, The Right Stuff did.  Thats not the say I didn’t enjoy the book.  In fact, I thought it was very informative.  The book compares Virginia and Jamaica in in terms of family units, demographics, religion, quality of life, from acquisition to emancipation.  It also looks at the lives and roles of slave owners.  I think the interesting contrast was that Virginia owners lived closely with their slaves and experienced population growth that allowed them to sell surplus slaves and/or expand their operations.  Jamaican slaveowners were absent from their plantations, relying on overseers to continually repurchase new slaves to replace those lost to disease and mistreatment.

The book details the lives of several generations of slaves and slaveholders in Virginia and Jamaica.  The book also compares and constrats the two situations.  The higher level detail I found to be very interesting.  The detail of the individual persons was informative but made for an extremely dense read.  Imagine a novel with hundreds of characters, and you will start to see why A Tale was so cumbersome a pursuit.  I think I would have preferred to read a higher level comparative analysis without all the details about the individuals, but admittedly, I would have missed a lot of information I found valuable had I enjoyed a more condensed version of the book. While I would recommend the book to those that are very interested in the history of slavery, particularly in Tidewater Virginia, my general feeling is that I’m glad I read this book, but I wouldn’t want to do it again.  In the interests of brevity and laziness, I’ll leave you with a few quotes I highlighted via my kindle.  Hopefully some the quotes will spark your interest as this really was one of the most informative and enlightening books I’ve ever read.

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ONE OF THE MAJOR DIFFERENCES between U.S. and British Caribbean slavery is that the North American slaveholders permitted and even encouraged their slaves to join the Christian church from the late eighteenth century through the Civil War, while almost all of the slaveholders in Jamaica and the other British islands strenuously opposed any program of religious instruction for their “heathen” black workers.

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These Mount Airy people were part of an enormous migration in which approximately one million African Americans born on the eastern seaboard were moved to the western and southern slave states between 1790 and 1860…

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…both argue forcefully that the thousands of new plantations established in the cotton states between 1800 and 1860 differed greatly in character from the eastern seaboard farms and plantations where the migrant slaves had previously lived. Their books differ in style and focus, but both historians see the American slave system erupting into a corrosive apogee of unprecedented wealth, intoxicating power, unbridled speculation, and virulent exploitation of black labor.

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…the cotton production system enabled reckless slaveholders in the Deep South to acquire dangerously great wealth and political power.

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Here they differed greatly from runaway slaves in the antebellum South who aimed to reach the northern states, where they could hope to be protected by abolitionists, or to get all the way to Canada. For Jamaican runaways there was no Canada.

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The revolt is often called the Baptist War because the initial slave leaders were converts to the Baptist Church who were inspired by the Bible to strike for freedom.

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The editor objected to a bill in the Jamaica Assembly prohibiting the flogging of female slaves, since women are harder to govern than men, and always the ringleaders of trouble.

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The editor was well aware that the sugar islands did benefit from the fact that absentee planters like Joseph Foster Barham II became virtual representatives by buying seats in the House of Commons, and the Courant’s worst fears were realized in 1833 when the reformed Parliament quickly passed the Slavery Abolition Act, which brought about emancipation in Jamaica in 1834.

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To move from Mesopotamia in 1760–1832 to Mount Airy in 1800–1860 is to enter a vastly different environment. It was not possible in the Northern Neck of Virginia, nor in the Alabama Canebrake, to stage a slave uprising in any way equivalent to the slave revolts of 1760 and 1831–1832 in Westmoreland. Slaveholders in the antebellum South were expanding in wealth, power, and ambition, not struggling like the Jamaican slaveholders.

 

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At Mount Airy, the field hands lived on scattered farm quarters, miles away from the domestics and craft workers who lived adjacent to the Tayloes’ plantation house, so that the two sets of slaves were socially separated.

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At Mesopotamia the head people led the way in joining the Moravian congregation that the Barhams sponsored, and they also led the way in defending their absentee owners’ estate during the slave revolts of 1760 and 1831–1832. At Mount Airy the opposite happened. Here the slaves with the greatest skills and the house servants who personally served the Tayloes were more likely to rebel or escape when they had the chance.

 

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The Mesopotamia head people lived in a black world with a small cadre of abusive whites ordering them around. As long as slavery was the only option, the slaves with the most responsible jobs wanted to protect the stake they had achieved in that black world, and they could reckon that the rebellions of 1760 and 1831–1832 were going to fizzle out. The wisest course was to follow the Moravians’ teachings: to oppose the revolt, to preserve their community, and to protect their small leadership stake. At Mount Airy, the skilled workers and domestics lived in a mixed black-white world with many more controlling white people close at hand. Rebels like Mary and Lizzie Flood, sick of dealing with the whites on a daily basis, were clearly revenging themselves on their owners. Two domestics who did not rebel, both of whom were characterized in 1862 by William Tayloe as “faithful” servants—Mount Airy house servant Armistead Carter, whose brother deserted, and coachman Ruffin Moore, whose daughter deserted—must have been strongly tempted to flee, but the risks were great. Three of the men who fled in 1861–1863 were carpenters, reflecting the fact that these workmen operated much more independently than the field hands and didn’t take kindly to discipline, as exemplified by Bill Grimshaw. And all of the thirteen Tayloe slaves who deserted during the Civil War had a broader view of the world and its possibilities than most of their colleagues. Working in or near to the big house, they were in the best position to learn about the course of the war and the possibility of freedom through flight. So the Mount Airy rebels, like the Mesopotamia cooperators, were exercising their intelligence, courage, and good judgment to achieve their goals.

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Black and colored people constituted over 90 percent of the population in the British islands, but only 40 percent in the southern states,

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It was obvious that in small, high-density islands such as Barbados and Antigua, where all the land was under cultivation, the apprentices, once freed, had little choice except to continue on the sugar estates as wage laborers.

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However, in Jamaica—and also in Trinidad and British Guiana—there was a great deal of unoccupied, uncultivated land, so the ex-slaves would be able to desert the sugar estates and set up independent peasant settlements in the bush.

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more than half of the resident workers in 1838 had left the sugar estates by 1844. And by 1861, when the census found 147,468 “laborers,” probably two-thirds of this huge undifferentiated group had become independent peasant farmers.

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From 1655 to 1834 there had always been more black deaths than births, and now the overall Jamaican black population was actually increasing

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But in this book I have aimed for something different. I have tried to show a Jamaican slave community in action during the final seventy years of British Caribbean slavery (1762–1834) and a Virginia-Alabama slave community in parallel action during the final seventy years of United States slavery (1792–1865).