Contested Bodies. Sasha Turner
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protected fertility. New laws empowered enslaved people to take their masters to courts, while the promised mitigation of punishment and relaxation of work regimes entitled women to claim protection from some of the worst elements of slavery. The claims enslaved men and women made on the liberties pronatalism afforded them extended their ongoing conflicts with their enslavers. A third set of struggles, therefore, occurred between plantation agents and enslaved people, who had conflicting views about appropriate responsibilities and discipline for women during pregnancy. These struggles reflect not just the ways in which pronatal abolitionism transformed enslaved women’s lives; they also reveal the centrality of women’s reproductive labor to the moral and economic ambitions of abolitionists and slaveholders, and reproductive concerns as essential to enslaved people’s resistance.
Pregnancy and Labor
Planters knew that field labor negatively affected childbearing but assumed that other tasks not related to sugarcane planting or sugar manufacturing would be more conducive to promoting healthy pregnancies. Planter Edward Long asserted, “Domestic Negroes have more children in proportion to those on the pens; and the latter than those who are employed on the sugar plantation. I will not deny,” Long declared, “Negroes breed the best, whose labour is least or easiest.”2 It is unclear whether the “pen” Long wrote about was a “livestock pen” operated as an independent unit or a “satellite pen” attached to sugar plantations. Although sugar dominated Jamaica’s economy from the late seventeenth century on, many investors capitalized on the need for independent industries, such as livestock farming and manure production. Their chief consumers were sugar planters, who relied on cattle for manure, haulage, transportation, and food. By the mid-eighteenth century, sugar planters who had been experimenting with new ways of increasing the efficiency and profitability of their estates invested in producing their own cattle on remote or unproductive parts of their properties. On sugar plantations like Golden Grove, Phillipsfield, and Pleasant Hill that evolved into “dual pen/sugar plantation” units, pens became a convalescent work site for seasoning new workers, recuperating sick workers, and retiring old workers, because planters insisted that pen-related work was lighter. In addition to cultivating pastures, digging watering holes, erecting fences, and collecting fodder, pen workers cultivated food crops like plantains and yams.3
Scholars comparing the labor routines of pens to plantations have argued that it was not “lighter” or “easier” work.4 Digging water holes and planting grass could be just as taxing on the body as digging cane holes and planting cane. The major difference between livestock pens and sugar plantations was that pens had no annual harvest that required workers to work around the clock.5 Planter perception that pen work was “easier” than tasks on the sugar estate, however, influenced how they managed female slaves they purchased for reproductive purposes. In 1789, attorney Simon Taylor promised to place the recently purchased young “wenches” at Bachelor’s Hall pen (attached to Golden Grove estate). There, he related, they “shall do no other work but to clean cocos [and] yams, which is the lightest work … and they shall not interfere with the estate’s work and [they] shall have every chance of breeding that is possible.”6
Assessing the estimation of Edward Long and Simon Taylor that women pen workers bore more children than sugar estate workers is more complicated than might be assumed. A demographic study using the register of returns of independent livestock pens reveals higher rates of natural increase, while an analysis of accounts of increase and decrease for dual pen-sugar plantation units suggests that workers on satellite pens had smaller families than women working on sugar estates.7 In comparison to women workers at John Tharp’s sugar estates (including Good Hope and Merrywood), fewer women at the pens (including Windsor, Chippenham Park, Covey, and Top Hill) bore the requisite six children to allow them full reprieve from plantation work in accordance with Jamaica’s ameliorative laws that exempted mothers with large families from field work.8 At Windsor pen in 1818, for example, only one woman, Keatty Ebo, took care of her children on a fulltime basis. We do not know, however, how many children Keatty Ebo mothered, as the records did not list them. Unlike estate inventories that more consistently listed women and the number of children they bore, bookkeepers at Windsor pen simply listed Keatty Ebo’s occupation as “minding her children.” The same is true for Top Hill pen, where only one woman, fifty-two-year-old Moll, birthed “many children.” No such mothers existed in the records for Chippenham Park pen, where Diana and Molly bore four children each, but continued working.9
Population size did not always correlate with the number of women with large families, and in some cases, women on sugar estates bore few children. Merrywood estate had 79 women workers, four of whom bore between six and seven children. Windsor pen had a similar number of female workers (76), but only one woman birthed six children. On large properties like Wales and Lansquenet estates, which had at least 127 and 149 females each, there is no record of women bearing six or more children between 1798 and 1818.
It is difficult to pinpoint specifically why women working at the sugar estates bore more children than those at the satellite pens. One reason could be the sheer volume of female workers on individual properties. Of Tharp’s seven estates and three pens in 1818, Covey estate had the largest female population, registering 158 women, 12 of whom bore at least seven children. Good Hope estate had the second largest female population (154) and only five women birthed six or more children. Of these seven estates, women working at five of them had large families. Among Tharp’s three pens, only one woman between1708 and 1818 had a family of more than six children. This mother resided at Windsor pen, which had the largest female population of all three pens. Of Windsor pen’s 76 females, only one woman had a large enough family to earn her exemption from hard labor. At Chippenham Park and Top Hill pens, which had the smallest female populations of 26 and 28 women, respectively, only two women at the former property bore four children.10
Myriad reasons exist for the variation in the number of children born on individual properties. Although planter correspondence stressed placing potential mothers at pens, estate inventories showed that workers moved back and forth between pens and estates. During the sugar harvest in particular, planters reassigned pen workers to the estate to meet the excessive work demands. Thus unlike enslaved people who toiled on independent livestock pens those belonging to dual pen-sugar plantation units were not necessarily spared the peak in labor demands during the harvest, since estate mangers rotated workers between estates and pens.11 Age distribution, residential arrangements, and the ratio of Jamaican-born (Creole) to African-born workers also informed fertility differences on these properties. From 1824 to 1828, Old Montpelier estate and Shettlewood pen consistently had larger families than New Montpelier estate. The larger proportion of Creoles under age twenty-five at Old Montpelier and Shettlewood pen determined a more steady population growth than New Montpelier estate, which suffered rapid population decline due to its large aging African population.12 Whereas abolitionists had simply emphasized increasing the population of women, the Jamaican Assembly and local planters insisted on importing captive women and girls below age twenty-five because they calculated that the plantations had an excess of workers beyond childbearing years.
Abolitionists’ use of slave population growth as an index of slavery reform inevitably led them into conflict with planters because slaveholders could not fully control women’s fertility. Diet, disease, place of birth (Africa versus Jamaica), and women’s attitudes toward childbearing combined with hard work and punishment to determine demographic stability.13 Placing women on pens did not guarantee higher conception and birthrates because this combination of factors determined population growth rather than just the demanding labor of the fields.
Ongoing labor shortages plagued Jamaican sugar estates because of high mortality and morbidity rates, delayed arrival of slave ships, and the lack of capital to purchase new workers. These shortages meant that sheltering parturient women from plantation work was not regularly practiced or sustainable.14 By the closing decades of the eighteenth century, enslaved women formed the bulk of field workers on the majority of Jamaican sugar estates. Reassigning them from the fields to the pens en masse would have crippled the economy and potentially forced the plantations to collapse. As described in the Introduction, field work relied on a gang system where laborers worked in three different gangs according to perceived