Contested Bodies. Sasha Turner
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they proposed two separate Christianization programs: one for adults and another for youths. In their plans, children would be isolated and indoctrinated exclusively by white missionaries, whereas evangelists as well as successful (enslaved) converts would teach adults. Missionaries would create a privileged class of converts who would receive greater rations and finer quarters in exchange for encouraging conversion and virtuous living among their fellow enslaved. This elite group of believers would check against all un-Christian practices and habits that could undermine the work of proselytizers. Privileged disciples would “superintend” fellows of the same sex. Thus, a woman who sinned privately should be “mildly reproved in private” by another person of the same sex. The individual should be brought before the congregation to account for offenses that were more public. However, if the offender “obstinately persist[ed] in the fault” she should be banished from the congregation. Those who remained devout, were obedient to their masters, and kept the Sabbath should be rewarded with such indulgences that will further “encourage them in their work,” betterment, and uprightness.58
The private sins of enslaved people of particular concern to abolitionists were their sexual relations. Abolitionists upheld Christian marriage as foundational for preparing future generations of free people. In their misguided assumptions about what constituted intimate relationships between people of African descent, abolitionists echoed slaveholders’ refrain that enslaved people exercised no libidinal restraint and were like “perfect brutes” who engaged in “promiscuous intercourse.” “A man,” Ramsay claimed, “may have what wives he pleased, and either of them may break the yoke of their caprice.” Christian marriage was necessary to eradicate such loose sexual conduct and promote morality. Marriage “is the embryo of society, it contains the principles, and feeds every social virtue. The care of family,” Ramsay stressed, “would make them considerate, sober, frugal, and industrious.” In married men, he wrote, one finds “a more useful and trust worthy citizen than he who is single” (emphasis added).59 In articulating abolition and reform through the reproductive lives of women, these proposals for encouraging marriage were not just about improving morals. The prevalence of venereal diseases in the colonies that undermined conception and birthrates meant that monogamous, Christian marriage also could eradicate what abolitionists thought was another obstacle to population growth.
Christian marriages promised to eliminate perceived sexual promiscuity as well as engineer gender relationships. By placing women in the fields and breaking apart families, slavery and the slave trade prevented women from occupying their rightful place within the households of their fathers and husbands. Abolitionist criticism of demographic failure was therefore a critique of slavery’s disruption of the supposed natural gender order in which women related to men as dependents and men ruled over their wives and children. Plans to abolish the slave trade by encouraging biological reproduction were part of a much larger vision for ultimate emancipation that involved placing women in subordinate positions as wives and mothers while elevating men as husbands, fathers, workers, and ultimately citizens. Only by becoming heads of their families could enslaved men share the privileges of Englishmen. In effect, claims of citizenship were beyond women’s reach. The ability to belong and participate in colonial society as citizens relied on embracing British cosmologies and an elite gender order, like those imparted by Christianity and Christian marriages.60
Abolitionist critique of the gender disorder slavery produced extended to masters’ paternalism, which negated the autonomy of males. Like many proslavery writers, abolitionists used children as symbols of primitivism, characterizing male slaves as childlike and not self-reliant because they depended on their masters. Paternalism emboldened the power slaveholders held over their bonded laborers precisely because it undermined the masculinity of enslaved men. Enslaved men in Ramsay’s perception were not prepared to assume the full responsibilities of freedom. “Like children,” he argued, “they must be restrained by authority and led to their own good” (emphasis added). In order to partake of the liberties extended to English men, enslaved men had to unlearn their dependence on their masters, marry, and assume authority and responsibility for their own households and families.61
Although these claims perpetuated the infantilized image of captive Africans used to rationalize slavery, abolitionist arguments were very different from those used by slavery defenders. In Ramsay’s postulations, children were “unspoiled by human nature” and consequently possessed the greatest potential for reform.62 Though childlike, enslaved adults lacked the innocence and open-mindedness of children. Missionaries were therefore more hard-pressed to realize their transformation. Tainted by the sociocultural circumstances of slavery and the slave trade, adults were irredeemable. This view reflected a more enlightened (though no less self-serving) view of African-descended people insofar as it avoided the argument that they were inherently inferior.63 Such reasoning was essential to abolitionist articulation of colonial reform through the reproductive capacities of women because this framing reiterated that biological reproduction would not regenerate perceived African inferiority. The image of captive Africans as perpetual children unable to live independent of their masters would contradict a reform agenda elaborated through women’s reproductivity.
To strengthen the argument that Africans and their descendants were capable of improvement, Ramsay extolled enslaved people born in the colonies, called “Creoles,” as having higher worth than those who were African born. Africans domesticated for “three or four generations in our colonies or made free three or four generations back were more intelligent than those who were born in Africa and had recently arrived in the colonies.” Creoles, he asserted, were more suited for cultivating the colonies, since they were more “hardy, diligent and trusty” than Africans.64 Using earlier estimates presented by planter Edward Long, Ramsay argued that Creoles were more productive than new captives. According to Long’s estimate, Creoles produced 250,000 hogsheads more sugar than imported captive Africans.65 Although Ramsay denounced the slave trade and slavery as immoral, he praised what in his estimation were improvements among African-descended people born in the colonies. “The farther back the negro can trace his Creolism,” he argued, “the more he valued himself and the more he was valued.”66 In commending what he presumed as the more civilized Creoles, Ramsay once more exposed his latent view that slavery was not the only reason he perceived African-descended people as culturally inferior. The African homeland also played a part in shaping its people’s supposed backwardness. Such postulations reiterated his position that reform through biological reproduction would not replicate African vices because they were learned, not inherited.
Believing that mixed-race children were even more sophisticated than Creoles, abolitionists advocated for their immediate freedom to the custody of churchwardens. Appointed custodians would act as guardians of colored children and ensure their placement into a “trade or business [in keeping] with their inclination and the demands of the colony.” The white fathers and owners of mixed-race children should bear the expenses of apprenticeship. In cases where the child’s father was not its owner, the father should secure its freedom by paying the mother’s owner the “right pounds sterling, as soon as the child is weaned.” The manumitted colored child should then be apprenticed to an appropriate trade. Fathers who refused to secure their children’s freedom and apprenticeship should be “fined an annuity equal to their [children’s] maintenance.”67
This proposal resembled the eighteenth-century British apprenticeship system in which family members or government ministries apprenticed young people. Private arrangements allowed children to learn the operations of a particular enterprise from a family friend or a business associate. In some cases, apprenticeship was simply girls working alongside their mothers to learn domestic chores, or boys working with their fathers to become carpenters, bricklayers, or farmers. In the more formal arrangements organized by individual parishes, the state placed apprentices with employers who would train them in service, agriculture, or industrial manufacture. The British apprenticeship system aimed to inculcate habits of industry and place children into their proper gender and class roles. Apprenticeships were not just about learning a skill; they also aimed to prepare girls for their life of domesticity and boys for more public roles.68 The heteropatriarchy of the apprenticeship program for mixed-race boys and girls implicitly promoted biological reproduction among the more “advanced”