HEARING SLAVES SPEAK by TREVOR BURNARD

INTRODUCTION

It is very difficult to hear West Indian slaves speak in the historical archive. Most were illiterate and thus unable to leave written records, not just in the harshest phases of African slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but also in the years of amelioration covered by the material in

Trevor Burnard
Trevor Burnard

this book. This period, following the end of the Atlantic slave trade, was marked by a supposed softening of the slave system and an increased concern among metropolitan Britons about how slave life and conditions were affecting slaves in the West Indies. Even if slaves had been literate, as so few were, they were always constrained by being in close contact with masters and mistresses, all of whom were supported by the coercive powers of the state. As James C. Scott states in his explorations of how the oppressed enter into discourse with oppressors, it is very rare that we catch a glimpse of what Scott calls the “private transcript” of the oppressed, what peasants or enslaved persons said to each other when their masters were not around or when representatives of power did not monitor and judge their words. It is close to impossible, therefore, to hear slaves speak freely, in voices unmediated by the context in which they found themselves.Trevor-book2

The records outlined below do not provide such unmediated reflections by slaves upon their condition. They are records created by official authorities as part of a governmental judicial process. But they do provide a rich, close to unparalleled, source of evidence about the contours of slave experience. They give us a good guide to the moral economy of enslaved people: what they considered their rights, what they thought they owed their owners and what their owners owed them, and what actions they thought so egregious that they would walk long distances to put forward their complaints to the Fiscal. This set of records helps us gain a rare entree into the world of enslaved people in Berbice in th1820s and 1830s, to their hopes and fears, and to the particular constraints and opportunities that they faced.
I have taken ninety-two cases presented before the Fiscal between 1819 and 1832, drawing them nearly at random from the voluminous records of the Fiscal of Berbice held in Colonial Office Series 116 at The National Archives, Kew, London, in order for readers to gain some perspective on the strange world of Berbice slavery in the dying years of slavery in the British Empire. I hope these records will contribute to a more complete understanding of the multifaceted realities of slavery in early nineteenth century Berbice, one of three colonies that became British Guiana in 1831. These records illustrate, through the complaints of slaves – complaints about overwork and excessive punishment, righteous indignation about ill-treatment of family members, accusations of petty criminality and sometimes charges of severe criminality, such as rape and, in a particularly interesting case, of obeah – how slavery operated in the British West Indies and how enslaved people negotiated their way through the uncomfortable situations that they found themselves in.
What is most important about the documents that form the basis of this book is that they reveal enslaved people as real people, as individuals who often quarrelled with each other but whom, it seems, shared similar aspirations and dreams about the lives they might be able to fashion for themselves. Responses from the white minority, usually as defendants, not only confirm slaves’ humanity and individuality, but also reveal the irony of a society where African Americans often responded to their environment in a variety of idiosyncratic ways, while their white owners and managers were constrained by the duty of solidarity, forever conscious of their numerical inferiority and the need to present consistent and homogenous opposition to demands from slaves. It is the voices of enslaved people, speaking through these records, that inspired the title of “Hearing Slaves Speak.” Before reading these cases, however, we should examine more closely the kind of documents that make up the Fiscal’s Records, and the social character of Berbice in the 1820s when these records were created.

The Fiscal’s Records
The Fiscal’s Records for Berbice, Demerara and Essequibo are contained with 24 large volumes kept at The National Archive in Kew, London. Overall, they contain perhaps 10,000 pages of information. In this volume, I have sampled records from only a few of the 24 volumes still extant – volumes 138, 139, 142, 143, 144, 147, and 148. Readers should be aware that masses of equally interesting or representative stories from the Fiscal’s reports from these and other volumes are not included here, demonstrating the richness of the sources available. Indeed, the Fiscal’s reports are that rare commodity, a virtually unused body of raw evidence about life under slavery for West Indian slaves. This book is intended as an introduction to the riches that are contained in these records. I have confined my attention to records from Berbice, in part because the range of records in respect of Berbice is especially large. Nevertheless, there are abundant records about Demerara in the 1820s that will also be of use to the researcher and student.
The Fiscal’s Records come in several forms. Perhaps the most valuable records are the manuscript and printed copies of complaints made, mostly by enslaved people, to the Fiscal about matters that outraged them. That many things outraged them can be seen in the wide variety in types of complaints that are listed in the ninety-two cases outlined below. Slaves welcomed an opportunity to put their case before a leading Crown official, even if their day in court more often than not left them without the redress that they sought. In addition to hearing slave complaints about their treatment, the Fiscal was in charge from the mid 1820s onwards of monitoring discipline on Berbice estates. He required the managers of estates to send to him each year a list of the number of punishments meted out to slaves on each estate. Managers had to provide the Fiscal with a list of all punishments, divided by how many were given to men and how many given to women, the kind of offences committed, and how many slaves were given floggings or placed in the stocks for a period of time.
The first part of this book offers a sample of some of these types of information: the prices of slaves when sold at public vendue; a summary of punishments in 1827-28 and in 1832; and an estate by estate listing of how many punishments were given, if any were given at all. What is noticeable about the latter records is how greatly estates varied in how extensively slaves were punished. Thus, John Ross, the manager of 440 slaves handed out 137 punishments in one four month period and 13 in the next four month period. Meanwhile H.E. Hockin, the owner of 309 enslaved people, gave only 16 and 14 punishments in the same time period. Slaves’ experiences could thus depend materially on the quality and effectiveness of the manager of the estate they lived upon. Just as interesting is the summary of the offences that enslaved people committed. The great majority related to disputes over work: 4,530 slaves were punished for bad work; 300 for refusing to work; 1,346 for disobedience or insolence. Slaves were also punished for criminality, ranging from attempted murder, to trying to commit suicide and to theft. The latter was quite common, accounting for 310 offences in 1827-28. Also significant were offences connected to moral delinquency, such as mistreating children, fornication and adultery, drunkenness, lying or ill-treating wives. Some of the most serious moral delinquencies related to practising obeah, or what whites considered witchcraft. In 1827-28 there were 11 such accusations made against slaves. Obeah was taken very seriously by the authorities: notably in a case found in the British Parliamentary Papers (this case will be published in a forthcoming volume of the Guyana Classics), entitled Trial of a Slave in Berbice, slaves found guilty of obeah faced execution. Case Eighteen below is a lengthy account of another obeah (or obiah) incident.
The Fiscal was a curious office for a British colony. In essence, the Fiscal was the chief legal officer of the colony, exercising an equitable function, similar to the Lord Chancellor in Britain, whereby slaves, who were legally not allowed to go to court, were able to come to him to complain that they were not being treated properly. The office of the Fiscal was a legacy from the Dutch history of the colony of Berbice; he was responsible for ensuring that planters adhered to The Rule on the Treatment of Servants and Slaves, a treatise on how slaves should be treated that the Dutch instituted in 1772 in order to curb slave unrest. Under the terms of the British acquisition of Berbice in 1803, the British were obliged to retain the Dutch bureaucracy of the colony, including the Fiscal. The Fiscal allowed slaves access to justice in ways that were denied them elsewhere in the British
West Indies. As the results of most of the cases treated below indicate, the Fiscal was not particularly inclined towards taking the enslaved person’s side. He was, after all, a prominent member of white society and he socialised with leading planter Case after case finished with the Fiscal admonishing the slave who brought forward a complaint and occasionally ended with him ordering the slave to face punishment.
Nevertheless, the Fiscal was a check on planters’ worst behaviour. Indeed, he had a vested interest in having slaves bring complaints before him. Initially, before 1814, he took one third of all fines levied against slave owners and managers. Subsequently, his salary was increased to ca. £8,000 per annum, partly in salary, partly in fees, making him the highest paid government official in the colony. He also imposed a fine on all slave owners who had a case brought against them, no matter what the outcome. Thus, the Fiscal encouraged rather than discouraged slaves in bringing forward criticisms to his court. Slaves, usually denied access to courts, had someone in the person of the Fiscal who would at least listen to their complaints, even if he did not act upon them. Consequently, slaves brought their concerns before the Fiscal at regular intervals and the Fiscal listened to them while his clerks wrote down what the slaves said, preserving their words seemingly as close to verbatim as was ever likely to occur in the annals of Atlantic slavery.
From 1819, complaints from slaves to the Fiscal were recorded in government documents for the first time. Despite the patois that slaves used being routinely smoothed over by the recording clerk, evidence suggests that the direct testimony of slaves complaining about their treatment was noted down faithfully and accurately. As such, the records of complaints brought before the Fiscal are a rare example of slaves speaking for themselves. Of course, legal records have their own difficulties. Natalie Zemon Davis memorably described the type of social history evidence gained through the testimony of poor people in courts as “fiction in the Archives.” There is a measure of fiction in the ninety-two cases outlined below, given that both slaves and their managers called to give evidence chose to shape their complaints and their testimony both to represent themselves to their best advantage and also to pander to the prejudices of the Fiscal. Thus, managers tried to show themselves as fair and humane masters, tested beyond endurance by recalcitrant slaves so that they were “under the necessity” (to cite a common phrase used by the Fiscal) of implementing punishments. Slaves, on the other hand, tried to present themselves as reasonable people, pushed beyond endurance. They often started their complaints in the manner of Quamy, in a case in C.O. 116/140 (not included here) representing 22 men who resented having to change from work on a coffee plantation to cutting down trees in the bush. Quamy began by saying “That we know we are purchased to work.” Similarly, Louis, complaining about a host of ill treatments from his female owner, began his complaint “I am not lazy nor a runaway. I am willing to work.” Consequently, this type of evidence needs to be seen as narrative accounts that have to be deconstructed and interpreted from a variety of angles, rather than being taken as simple elaborations of fact. Moreover, a slave giving a complaint against a master or mistress knew that his or her testimony was likely to have consequences, even if the Fiscal was very strict about the maintenance of his authority. He took a decidedly dim view of any owner or manager who chose to punish a slave for making a complaint.
In some ways, the system was designed to benefit the weaker party – the slave who could speak in ways that he or she seldom could do openly before white people. This is not to say that slaves got a free ride when coming to complain to the Fiscal. In the majority of cases, as noted above, the slave complaint was dismissed and the slave faced at the very least a stern ticking off from the Fiscal – a man who generally viewed matters from the viewpoint of the slaves’ proprietors and who believed that discipline would be ruined if masters’ authority was not supported. Some idea of the Fiscal’s attitude to slaves can be gleaned from a letter by H.M. Bennett to Governor Sir B. D’Urban that “nine times out of ten the complaints proceed from the most indolent and worthless slaves on the estate.” It was quite common for slaves to be scolded for his or her behaviour, even if the grievance was upheld. Laurence, for example, complained that his manager flogged him for not making good fires. The Fiscal listened to his complaint – very briefly – and dismissed the case, reprimanding Laurence and telling him to “attend to his duty.” But at least slaves were able to have their grievances heard and, in some cases, listened to. In Laurence’s case, for example, the manager was forbidden “from flogging or striking a negro with a horsewhip.” Even if they did not succeed, slaves did draw the attention of important whites to the conduct of managers, occasionally initiating the removal of managers who had lost the trust of slaves. How individual plantations were managed was vitally important. Most disputes centred on particular issues on particular estates under the control of particular managers. The great majority of managers never had any slave come before the Fiscal. Most complaints were directed at managers that slaves thought were either incompetent or very harsh: 73 percent of several thousand complaints in the Fiscal’s Records were directed at 20 managers with 55 percent being focused on just 10 managers. One of the virtues of the Fiscal’s reports is that through these reports we can determine how slave management was meant to work, and when and for what reasons it broke down. It would break down because a manager or owner lacked the personal authority to force enslaved people to do what he wanted them to do.

Berbice in the 1820s
These cases were heard in a very peculiar society, one of the more complete slave societies ever known, but a slave system that was growing just at the time that slavery in the British Empire was coming under unprecedented attack from abolitionists, appalled at slavery’s violence and immorality. Berbice in the 1820s was close in its social structure to eighteenth century Jamaica or to low-country South Carolina. It was a frontier settlement where lands were being developed and where a plantation economy was becoming established. It was similar to both of these societies in being a close to complete slave society in which over 90 percent of the population of nearly 23,000 were slaves. Most of these slaves – three quarters of those aged over 15 in 1819 – were born in Africa, with the majority being men of prime working age. The majority of slaves worked on the 140 plantations that hugged the coast and which had been created through painstaking labour in the dense Guiana forests and rugged coastline. Most lay below sea level and thus needed constant maintenance. Coffee was the major crop, although sugar was fast supplanting its supremacy in the 1820s. Ownership was largely concentrated outside of the colony and the white managerial population was small, mostly male, and well aware of the threat that slaves posed to their safety. Mortality was high and the slave population was not self- sustaining. Berbice was thus what Barry Higman calls one of the third phase sugar colonies, colonies that shared social and economic characteristics more like those of slave societies in the period of the slave trade than of colonies in the period of widespread amelioration.
These colonies were also colonies where slavery was noticeably harsh. Punishment records in the Fiscal’s Records indicate that in a six month period, one fifth of all slaves were given a punishment. The total number of punishments amounted to nearly 7,000 for a population of 20,000 slaves. Of those punishments, 25 percent involved a whipping, suggesting that approximately 7 percent of male slaves were flogged in a typical six month period. Slaves in Berbice had a better time than slaves in Demerara, where sugar production was more extensive, if such comparisons between relative levels of hardship are worth making. Nevertheless, the information in the Fiscal’s Records indicate that slaves in Berbice also faced very difficult conditions, just like their compatriots in Demerara. Their situation was aggravated by the personal nature of slave management and by the anxiety that white managers and owners felt towards their charges. That anxiety often led them to lose control over their actions when exasperated about slave actions and attitudes. Managers felt isolated on distant plantations and when pushed beyond endurance, lashed out wildly at the people they felt responsible for destroying good order on their estates.
One such occasion, noted in C.O. 116/140 but not included in the list of cases below, occurred when a manager discovered that a favourite and expensive mare had been fatally wounded by malicious use of a carpenter’s adze. A slave related how when he was told of the injury the manager “pulled out a wattle and began beating Jackson [the messenger] and he licked the man till he could not see.” By his estimate he gave Jackson 150 lashes (when the legal limit was 39), put him in the stocks and then flogged him again. Jackson said “Massa you are going to kill me” and the manager allegedly replied that “if I kill you there is no law there for you.” He then forced Jackson to watch the horse die in his arms. The manager suspected that one of four slaves wounded the mare but none of the four slaves would own up (the culprit was probably an ex-carpenter called Quamina, who was angry about being demoted from carpentry to working in the field). Enraged, he put all four slaves in the stocks, binding their hands hard and keeping them in the stock every night for two weeks. He refused to let the sick nurse see them and forced them to use chamber pots rather than being released from the stocks when necessary. The slaves were in great pain as they were “tied by their wrists to a beam and hawled up to an extent that their toes barely touched the ground.” The manager, as the Fiscal recognised, had lost all sense of perspective when losing a favoured horse. What is significant, however, is that he could act on his high passions tothe detriment of slave welfare.
Slaves complained about excessive punishment; about being moved against their will; about being demoted from trades to fieldwork; about masters not taking into account their sickness and especially the sickness of children, several of whom died; about masters’ cultural insensitivity; and about food and clothing allowances being inadequate. From the complaints a reasonably clear picture emerges of what slaves thought was the minimum due to them as slaves. They felt entitled not to be asked to work more than their strength allowed; to receive food and clothing sufficient to survive; to have time off, especially on Sundays and on public holidays, and not to be expected to work when they had time off; to be cared for when sick, and to have their legitimate claims to be sick listened to, and that they should not be punished when they accomplished their tasks, behaved according to the rules and were not insubordinate.
A close look at three cases gives us more information about the sort of things that slaves thought were beyond the pale. Mistreatment of wives and especially children brought especially fierce complaints. One of the most compelling cases, Case Sixty Nine in this book, arose out of the death of a young girl, Elizabeth, and the determined efforts of her parents to try and find justice for her after her very early death. The Fiscal noted that Telemachus and Caroline, the parents of the recently deceased Elizabeth, came to see him to complain that their daughter had died because the manager had forced himself upon her, even though “she having not yet arrived at the state of womanhood.” A long investigation followed in which it appeared that Elizabeth may have been deflowered by a young negro boy (although most of the suggestions were that his attempt upon her failed) and that the cause of her death was
“nervous debility,” not shock from being penetrated by a male before she had reached puberty. But Telemachus and Carolin were not convinced. They knew just how extensive was the sexual abuse of young women by white men and did not trust white doctors to tell them the truth about what their white masters did. Telemachus insisted that the manager was lying about being connected with Elizabeth. He provided the Fiscal with lots of circumstantial evidence, much of which is very valuable for rounding out how enslaved people lived and occasionally thought, that seemingly supported his claim. What is interesting is less whether Telemachus was right in his suspicions that a rape had been committed than is the innate assumptions that slaves had about both white lack of faith and also that white people would conspire to deny justice to black people. Just as interesting is how determined a slave father was to see his dead child be treated right after her death. It denies a common claim made during slavery that enslaved people, especially slave men, did not care for their children. Telemachus cared deeply; deeply enough to make the very dangerous accusation that a manager had raped his child. One imagines that he had to live with very serious consequences once his case was dismissed and he had to return to his plantation home.
Insensitivity on the part of managers to slave family life was also at the centre of another complaint. In a case not included here, Billy complained that his master, Richard Bell, had shown a lack of respect to his slaves by measuring up a very sick slave for a coffin before that slave had died and burying the slave “the very moment he died and before he was cold.” He added the poignant image of the slave looking up at the carpenter Demerara measuring him for size, seeing what he was doing and hanging down his head. For Billy, Bell’s callousness was part of a general pattern of lack of care towards the sick. He detailed another case of a slave dying after being forced to work when clearly ill and concluded with his own situation. He claimed he had a pain in his stomach “if the sun is hot upon me” but that his master thought him just lazy and forced him and other slaves to work beyond endurance. Billy’s inability to work as required led Bell to have him flogged by the driver. Adding insult to injury, Bell stood upon his shoulders while he spread eagled on the ground during his flogging, causing him to vomit blood. In testimony intended to curry favour with the Fiscal, he claimed that Bell had replied to a slave comment that his management methods were killing his slaves that “when he purchases Negroes [neither] the governor nor the Fiscal gives him money to pay for them, therefore when he does buy” them he can do with them as he likes.” Claiming that Bell had refused to accept that he was sick rather than lazy, Billy “came here to complain, finding I could get no redress.”
The complaint therefore was in two parts – the callous early dispatch of a dead slave and punishment for what Billy though was a legitimate complaint of illness, neither obviously connected. Billy’s ambition was to connect the two together. No- one disputed the facts of the first complaint and Bell was admonished by the Fiscal for “want of proper feeling” which was “bound to operate prejudicially on the minds of his negroes and would create discontent among them.” But the Fiscal would not accept the second complaint and ordered that Billy be punished at his discretion. He accepted the testimony of Demerara that Billy was “a strong man but lazy inclined and always complaining of sickness.” For that reason, Demerara did not like to work in the same Pen with him. Another slave, Charles, agreed with Demerara’s assessment that Billy’s character was “not good” although he thought that his backwardness with his work was due to sickness. For Bell, the case was cut and dried. Billy was a “very lazy idle negro and a liar.”
What is interesting about these cases, as with another case involving insubordination from a female house servant when extraneous material on sexual exploitation was included as part of the slaves’ deposition, is how slaves presented information to the Fiscal that had strictly little to do with a specific complaint but which was intended to show a pattern of misbehaviour on the part of their owners and managers. What makes these complaints especially valuable from an historian’s perspective is that the Fiscal allowed slaves to ramble off the point in order that he might get a full picture of slave life in the colony. Here, Billy wanted redress for what he considered excessive and unfair punishment by implying a general pattern of unconcern for slave welfare. He was well aware, it seems, that the British government was committed to a policy of amelioration and that it was concerned about the extent of slave mortality in its new colonies. His testimony was expressly constructed so as to find a sympathetic ear.
Family concerns were sometimes so paramount to slaves that they were willing to entertain what seem to us paradoxical solutions, such as seeking to be sold to another master, in order to preserve their familial ambitions. In Case Forty Nine, for example, Klaas and Hendrick both complained that they had been sold “under circumstances of peculiar hardship and oppression.” For both men, what especially angered them was their owner’s indifference to their family situation. Klaas had an aged mother whom he cared for in New Amsterdam. He lamented his owner’s decision to sell him to a sugar estate twenty five miles from town. Hendrick, a slave who had foregone the opportunity to become free when taken by his owner in the United States and had returned to Berbice so that he could be close to his family, similarly wanted to protest about being sold a long way from family members. In support of Klaas’s case, the Fiscal heard heart-rending testimony from his old and sick mother, with a complicated story about arrangements for how whoever purchased Klaas was bound to purchase also his mother. His owner, Colonel Nixon, a very highly placed planter-politician, protested that he had treated Klaas well, that his intentions were honourable and that he had sold Hendrick because Hendrick was violent and unstable. Nixon tried to fashion his evidence so as to suggest that he was receptive to familial arguments although the subtext of his evidence makes clear how much the sales of the slaves had been motivated primarily by his own financial gain. Eventually, the Fiscal ruled that Klaas had the right to choose his owner by himself, thus countermanding an important slaveholding principle: that the right to dispose of slaves as one pleased was sacrosanct. The demands of family in this case trumped the privileges of property.
Not all complaints were by individuals wanting a solution to individual problems. One example, not included in the cases below but typical of them, was a complaint from 22 men belonging to L.F. Gallez (an owner who was frequently a subject of complaints but who was also the sole proprietor who urged his slaves to formalise marriages). Quamy, representing these men, started off his complaint with a ritual acknowledgement that he knew that slaves “are purchased to work.” He then launched into a litany of complaints about being worked too hard, and that slaves on Gallez’s property were flogged unreasonably because they did not produce the work that was needed “until we run away into the bush.” However, because of obligations to family and friends and from personal distaste for the challange of life in the thick South American jungle, running away into the bush, according to Quamy, “is something that we cannot do.” It was not only excessive work that bothered these slaves but interference in slave family life. “He will never leave us quiet about our wives,” Quamy complained. He continued: “If they are pregnant he is vexed and finds fault upbraiding us that we are good for nothing but to get women with child – if the women have children, they are not allowed to stop at home.” What he wanted was a return “to former times.” The slaves were agitated by what they considered to be unreasonable work loads, brought on by the owner buying two estates in the bush that needed clearing – hard, physical labour that taxed slaves beyond endurance. They suspected he was in financial strife – “whether he has lost money by the Estates we do not know” – and was skimping on food and clothing for slaves while forcing slaves to work. Echoing the previous complaint, complainants noted that Gallez was disrespectful to slaves who died and dismissive of slave illness. If a slave died, “he only allows 3 or 4 to bury and no coffin is given unless we find the boards.” If a slave was sick, “he gives us physic and in 2 or 3 days drives out to work.”
Gallez, predictably, denied all these accusations and supported his case with evidence from April, an elderly driver, “father and grandfather of seven slaves.” April denied that the slaves were ill-treated and thought they were poor workers. “The negroes,” he averred, “did not work and I repeated it to my master as I was duty bound.” Presumably, the complaining slaves may have thought April’s duty was not to his master but to them. The result, also predictably, was that the case was dismissed as “frivolous” and the slaves had to beg pardon from their master. They may, however, have proved their point. The large number of slaves complaining suggests widespread dissatisfaction with management practices on the estate. Being asked to beg pardon was at the very low end of possible punishments. Whites in Berbice, one year after the Demerara revolt of 1823, would have been very aware that a major cause of that revolt was a sudden intensification of work patterns in the colony. This complaint fell into that category, one which possibly presaged larger political action

The meaning of the Fiscal’s Reports
What are we to make of these reports? One way of viewing the various cases that are presented below is that they allow us to see relationships between black and white within the context of negotiations between people with varying and shifting amounts of power, both of whom are trying to gain an advantage over each other and who are often, as in the cases coming before the Fiscal, attempting to place their position in the negotiating process before the bar of public opinion. Of course, all this harks back to an older but still powerful scholarship, that of Edward Thompson and his notion of moral economy. It suggests that the language of class needs to be added to that of race more often than it is in slavery studies – this is one of the most important points that Ira Berlin reminds us of in his gentle admonitions concerning how slavery should be studied, in his work on differences over time in the history of African-Americans in bondage.
Emilia Viotta Da Costa in her work on these reports makes excellent points on what is implied about slave expectations in the complaints that they brought before the Fiscal. She conceives of these expectations in terms of “rights,” an assumption on the part of slaves that there was an unspoken contract, “an invisible text that defined rules and obligations.” Slaves expected to follow rules but believed slave owners had obligations. These duties and obligations could be summed up, she feels, as being that “all slaves should perform according to their abilities, and all should be provided according to their needs.” What these “abilities” and “needs” were had to be negotiated both individually and collectively between slave and master. Again and again in the complaints, slaves protested about treatment they thought unfair and for which they had not received proper redress. What is clear is that they wanted a say in their treatment and wanted to be able to remonstrate when they felt they had a grievance. This attitude could be seen as comprising resistance but this underplays the extent to which the acceptance that slaves had duties they should perform suggests that slaves accepted the right of masters to control them and to keep them in slavery. The problem with resistance as an historical concept is that when it is used, except in the most sensitive hands, it implies that slaves would not put up with enslavement in any of its forms and that they strove constantly to try and gain freedom or at least an advantage over their master in what amounted to a racial and class war. If this is the case, then resistance can only be seen as wildly unsuccessful, as so little everyday “resistance” led to outright rebellion. Moreover, the evidence of the Fiscal’s reports suggests that enslaved people may not have liked slavery but that generally they put up with most aspects of enslavement and only protested about matters they thought especially unjust. It might be, as Da Costa argues, that “without the daily and tenacious acts of defiance and sabotage, rebellions would have been difficult, if not impossible,” but the limited number and small impact of slave rebellions make daily conflicts between slave and master devoid of political significance. As David Brion Davis has commented:

How could workers who were relatively free from
market forces produce so much or drive such economic
growth, especially when historians claim they were
engaged in subtle forms of day-to-day resistance? I have
seen no satisfactory answers to such questions, but
suspect that the negotiating and bargaining between
slaves and masters often led to compromises that
actually aided productivity.

Thinking about slave resistance requires as much consideration of masters as of slaves. A major problem with the resistance paradigm is that it is overwhelmingly focused on what slaves were up against and what they did to overcome their problems. Masters become shadowy figures, obstacles to be overcome on the march to autonomy, self-respect and freedom. But what comes out clearly in the complaints of Berbice slaves is that the power of masters was always constrained by their fears, by their capabilities and especially by their knowledge of what their slaves might do if they did not at all times maintain a pose of mastery.
Masks kept on slipping. The relationship between slaves and masters was a delicate balancing act. Slaves probably did see the relationships in terms of duties and obligations, as Da Costa suggests, but the person who had to adjudicate over what were these rights was the slave proprietor. In this respect, white owners and managers were the active partners in a negotiated relationship; slaves were the passive recipients but recipients whose response to what they were given could determine the outcome of negotiations.
It goes without saying that these negotiations were unfriendly and that the balance of power was always on the side of the master. The Fiscal made the distribution of power between master and slave clear in a couple of cases where slaves questioned slave owners’ motives and attempted to claim a stake in the management of properties. When Scipio complained, in Case Five, that his manager had forced him to work despite Scipio’s claim to be sick, the Fiscal chided him after hearing and dismissing his case. Summarising the judgment, the Fiscal stated that although “slaves were in all cases of grievances permitted to prefer their complaints, and that every attention should be paid thereunto, and the same redressed when so entitled, yet that the duty of the President, as well as the Fiscal, was to punish false accusations of slaves against their owners and managers.” Scipio was ordered to be flogged “in the presence of the Fiscal on plantation Friends, as an example to the gang of that estate.”
It would be wrong, therefore, to assume that slaves thought they were in a shared enterprise with masters, even though on occasions and for their own purposes they asserted a sense of collective identity as residents of a single plantation in ways that coincided with the interests of managers and overseers. In this way, the small world of the plantation could be distinguished from the larger world of imperial politics, where the interests and values of ruled and ruler was meant to coincide more often than not. The ideal of the monarchical society was a wise ruler and happy subjects. That ideal was achieved surprisingly often in early modern Britain and British America. When James II succeeded to the throne in 1685, the corporation of Monmouth acknowledged that it was the King’s “Right to Rule and Govern” and his “Subjects’ Duty to Obey.”
Even though planters sometimes had the conceit that their plantations were little kingdoms, these kingdoms were always unhappy ones, with little sense of shared values. In such cases, the job of the man who made decisions could be very difficult, which is clear from many of the complaints from slaves in Berbice. As everyone knew from their memory of seventeenth century strife between absolutist Stuart monarchs and resentful and rebellious subjects, retaining the support of underlings was extraordinarily difficult, even in social systems predicated upon deference and upon the God-ordained legitimacy of monarchs, masters and fathers. By the early nineteenth century, the force of revolutions and changing familial relations that weakened the power of patriarchs had put great strain on the values of the old regime but within slavery such values still held strong, even in strongly capitalist societies such as Berbice, where ownership and daily control over dependents was often separate. Slave owners and their representatives still expected to be obeyed unquestionably and framed their rule in patriarchal ways. Gaining respect and loyalty from people who had neither consented to being ruled (even if they accepted that being ruled was an inevitable part of the human existence) was much more difficult and many slave owners failed to convince their charges, either through force or persuasion that they should be loyal and respectful of duly constituted authority.
A good portion of the master’s authority resided in his personal abilities, especially his ability to muster the considerable coercive forces at his disposal. These included, crucially, the support of the state as ultimate guarantor of slaveholder power and privilege. In the end, it was the authority of the state that allowed owners and managers the power to force slaves to do what he wanted them to do. What is extraordinary, in retrospect, is how many masters were able to get slaves to accept their authority. The very full records of Berbice indicate that 768 slaves took legal action against their masters in 1824/25 but that there were no complaints from slaves from nearly three quarters of plantations in which two-thirds of slaves were held. In other words, less than one in four managers had to come in front of the Fiscal to answer a complaint. Three in four managers were able themselves to resolve conflicts within the plantation system.
The complaints brought before the Fiscal were therefore the relatively rare examples where compromises between slaves and masters had not been found possible. Compromise between slaves and managers made the system work; force alone could not do so. Violence was at the heart of the system and masters achieved their aims largely through the application of violence and through employing spiritual terror to cow slaves into submission. But slavery was a contestation that required negotiation because the power of masters, as complaints from Berbice makes clear, was not absolute. Skilled managers (about whom we do not hear from in the records) got their way; less skilled masters faced problems. As Ira Berlin argues, “the we of interconnections” between slave and master “necessitated a coexistence that fostered grudging cooperation as well as open contestation.”34

The moral lessons of the Fiscal’s Records I mention how slavery was complicated by human relations because the job of the historian is not to point out moral lessons but to provide evidence about the past so that we can recognize the ways in which people in the past lived, worked and thought in all their messy complexity. Inevitably, however, especially when dealing with a subject as morally fraught as slavery, issues of morality intrude. There is little point, lamenting the cruelties of enslavement and being outraged that so many people led stunted lives as a result of racially divided exploitation for financial gain. We don’t get very far by thinking of history as a series of moral judgements upon our ancestors and our ancestor’s oppressors. One of the virtues of the Fiscal’s records is that in their depth of coverage of both slave owners and enslaved people we come to understand that slavery was a complicated process of negotiation. The enslaved people in these records are far from perfect. They fight each other, as in the last case in this book, where two women fought in an undignified fashion over the affections of a white man; they drink too much, as in Cases Eighty Two and Eighty Six when the aptly named Champagne was hauled up before the Fiscal for excessive drunkenness; and they behave towards each other sometimes with a conscious lack of humanity. At the same time, they demonstrate, as can be seen in Telemachus’s admirable insistence on his dead daughter gaining justice, that slaves did not lose their humanity when trapped in a coercive system.
Nevertheless, one cannot look at the past in an entirely dispassionate way. One needs empathy for one’s ancestors and for the situation that they found themselves in. A principal aim of this series is to introduce, especially for the people of Guyana, who live the legacy of enslavement and of the brutality of plantation life into the present day, reminders of the past that has so shaped the present. Slavery was a monstrous system, even when there was an office like the Fiscal in which some of the worst excesses of enslavement were mitigated. It is hard not to conclude that many of the complainants in these cases led constricted lives, full of pain, both psychological and physical, due to the injustices of enslavement. This volume of sources, in which we get as much direct testimony from the mouths of slaves as the imperfect source material of the past allows, is a modest contribution to trying to understand how enslaved people navigated these lives full of pain and sometimes enjoyment. My belief is that if we hear slaves speak and listen to what they say, then those people, long dead but not forgotten, can tell us things of value both in order to understand the past and also to appreciate the present and prepare for the future.

(By TREVOR BURNARD, University of Warwick)

SHARE THIS ARTICLE :
Facebook
Twitter
WhatsApp

Leave a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

All our printed editions are available online
emblem3
Subscribe to the Guyana Chronicle.
Sign up to receive news and updates.
We respect your privacy.