Analysis of Social Control Within Slave Society in Jamaica

This essay will define ‘social control’, in this context, as the white dominance over the slave, mentally, physically and socially. It will focus explicitly on how, despite their numerical disadvantage, the plantocracy survived atop the social hierarchy of Jamaica. This analysis will focus on the ‘slave society’ within the colony of Jamaica, specifically during the most brutal period of British rule, between 1750 -1780. This period offers an abundance of primary sources such as Thomas Thistlewood’s diary, along with a Summary of the Legal System between 1746 - 1782, which detail the plantocracy’s use of terror. Primary sources from the perspective of the slave, whilst especially useful, are generally unavailable as a result of their subjugated social position, therefore inferences must be made from the perspectives of the ruling class.

Described as ‘one of the most dehumanizing systems ever devised’, the terror experienced by slaves was not purely physical, rather, it was interwoven into the cultural, social and economic characteristics of the plantation. Firstly, the physical terror employed by the plantocracy was overwhelmingly cruel. Slaves endured terrible living conditions of subsistence and disease. This facilitated a state of survival, further exasperated by the gruesome and often sadistic punishments many endured. For women, this violence also manifested itself through the sexual opportunism of the white ruling class. Secondly, the plantocracy aimed to extend their authority over the spiritual world, manipulating African cultural beliefs and practices through post-mortem disfigurement and manipulation of African icons. Such terror was consolidated when valorized within a legal framework, for example the 17th century Slave Codes, which articulate the slave’s inferiority, a precedent which was maintained throughout my period of analysis.

Finally, through analysis of the limited economic and social autonomy slaves held, specifically through cultivation of provisional grounds and in the building of familial and sexual relations. This essay will detail the root of slave conservatism which ruined their long term goal of undermining the social order. This will lead me to my conclusion that terror, most centrally mental terror and fear, was crucial to the plantocracy’s continuing social dominance. This was exacerbated by the limited freedoms gifted to slaves, which promoted the slave’s reliance on owners and masters.

Terror, and suffering, was endemic within every aspect of Jamaican slave life, the daily routine reinforcing the slave’s state of emotional and physical dilapidation. This is supported quantitatively from statistics and qualitatively from written records. Whilst there are limited sources from the slave’s perspective, journals such as Thistlewood's diary articulate the lives of African-born slaves from an impartial, factual perspective. The reliability of the source stems principally from the minimal attempts at self-censorship or justification, indicative of a man ‘unconcerned about the morality of his life and actions.’ Such an outlook was typical of the plantocracy, stemming from their view of black slaves as ‘a sort of beast and without souls’ . His diary details the arduous everyday life endured by the slaves, with the risk of death constant, stemming from, as Burnard describes ‘Overwork, malnutrition, accidents, harsh punishment and disease.’ Such living conditions are a form of terror in themselves, in that they normalise suffering and make death ubiquitous. Quantitative data further supports the fragility of life within slave society, as between 1730 and 1775, 300,000 slaves were imported into Jamaica, but the total enslaved population had only increased by 125,000 in 1775. The impact of this consistent threat of death was the creation of a culture of survival that undermined familial and social relationships and limited the slave’s ability to resist the oppression of the plantocracy, by developing a community or shared response along racial lines.

When studying the historiography surrounding the slaves’ lives, their hopelessness becomes evident through the abundance of suicide as a form of resistance within contemporary accounts. A plantation doctor noted how one slave, a self proclaimed ‘man of consequence’, threw himself off a bridge during transportation after stating “he would be a slave to no man.” Therefore, for many Africans, the prospect of being returned to their loved ones in the afterlife was a singular comfort; the prospect allowed African slaves to preserve a sense of social being. This is supported by Brown, who attributes suicide as coming as a result of “social isolation and diminished status.” Therefore, it can be argued that the very nature of everyday life for a slave supported the social structures in place. A society where basic survival is not guaranteed , and which for many is meaningless, when combined with the constant risk of severe pain through punishment, means that any challenge to the social hierarchy is rendered pointless and ineffective.

Whilst obedience, and acceptance of the continuity of daily suffering was rewarded, physical terror and punishment was used, in a form of domination over the black body, for any crimes which contradicted the white hegemony. Crucial to this argument is the analysis of an 1834 summary of 162 cases involving 202 defendants within St Andrew, between 1746 - 1782, a useful source as ‘one of a very few records’ of everyday slave court decisions. Similar records are unavailable due to magistrates and freeholders' illegal failure to note down decisions made, evidence for the autonomy Slave Courts had in their choices of punishment. The summary displays the prevalence of physical punishment, with 88 of 153 cases involving flogging with an average of 76 lashes. Flogging as a form of punishment became critical as representative of the unequal interrelationship between master and slave, made evident by the dominance it exhibited over the black body, as the scars left displayed ownership similar to the branding of livestock.

As ‘a popular association between flogging and enslaved status’ emerged, it increasingly became a symbol of the slave’s disgraced position, an argument supported by John Stewart’s contemporary analysis, which accredits the Maroon war of 1795 as starting due to the flogging of two Maroons: rather than injury, it was the degrading nature of the punishment that, according to Stewart, resulted in a desire for vengeance. Yet flogging was not reserved for legal punishment, and as recorded within Thistlewood's diary, was used frequently and harshly outside the legal system. This was encouraged by the white community, with Thistlewood noting in 1763 that his ‘neighbour dismissed an overseer because he did not discipline his slaves sufficiently.’ Generally, however, the opposite was true of white slave owners, and such brutality is revealed within Thistlewood's account. Sadistic punishments include rubbing salt, lemon juice and urine into their wounds, and in the case of one slave, making his fellow slave defecate into his mouth and then gagging the recipient. Such brutality is indicative of a contempt for the slave, which is central to the plantocracy’s identity and the slave’s damaged psyche. The significance of Thistelwood’s use of bodily fluids, an inversion of the African Obeah practices, would, to slaves, emphasise and reinforce such social positions. Such examples of physical control, under the guise of punishment, magnifies the white European power in a direct opposition to the powerlessness of the black Africans. Therefore, the mental impact such daily brutality had was to consolidate the slave’s self identity as abject inferiors whilst reinforcing a rigid racial hierarchy and white European supremacy.

This small number of white Europeans forming the ruling class, consistently abused their power, which made their dominance precarious and the social hierarchy of Jamaica fragile. Outnumbered drastically, their fear manifested itself in increased brutalisation with the aim to cement their view of black slaves as inhuman into the social fabric of Jamaica. A central method used to achieve their aims was described by Peter Spierenburg as a “spectacle of suffering”, through the practice of permanent mutilation and disfigurement as a form of punishment, which unlike flogging, was not practiced within England. One example, the case of runaway slave Priscilla who had “both (her) ears were cut off,” with other, similar punishments common within the 1834 summary. Whilst it must be noted that such mutilations were removed from contemporary accounts towards the end of the 18th century, unofficial practices are likely to have continued. These punishments take on greater significance as a means of social control, when considering the African practice of ‘obeah’, a term originating from West Africa which refers to the spiritual powers of certain ‘charms’. Due to these spiritual beliefs, a symbolism of mutilation was created. Significantly, a central tenant within African religious belief is that the body needs to be whole to return to its homeland after death. Therefore, such mutilations dehumanize the victim both physically and spiritually, as the reassurance that death will elevate the slave’s worldy suffering is removed. This acted as a compelling deterrent to any deviation from the social order. Whilst mutilation served as a powerful incentive for slaves to obey, it also augmented white supremacy and reinforced the hierarchy, by attaching ‘wordly authority to transcendent concerns… allowing the plantocracy’s power to reach into the imaginations of slaves.’

This authority was further employed by the white plantocracy through post-mortem examples. An especially potent humiliation of the dead in impacting on the mind of slaves, was through the association of places, specifically the large silk trees, where black African slaves believed ‘the spirits of the dead dwelt.’ Slaves were executed with body parts nailed to such trees in an appropriation of African cultural practices, the execution itself being a form of ‘shadow catching’ to the onlooking Slaves. Therefore, the white European power transcended the physical in the eyes of the African slave to become metaphysical. In doing so, the plantocracy are instilling white dominance as part of the black slave’s core beliefs and manipulating African culture into supporting the social order.

However, Obeah, despite its uses to the plantocracy, was of critical importance to slave society as a form of cultural resistance to creolization and white domination, its power most acutely seen during Tacky’s rebellion. The 1760 rebellion, where ‘60 whites (were killed) and thousands of pounds of property was destroyed’, was the most significant attack to the plantocracy within the British Caribbean. Within the rebellion, the ideological dichotomy between the promotion of obedience through terror, and the social identity African slaves maintained through their spiritual beliefs and continuation of African cultural practices, came to light. Obeah men administered ‘binding loyalty oaths’ to the rebels using a concoction of ‘blood, rum and grave dirt.’ The significance of such oaths was further revealed in the wave of suicides that followed the rebellion’s failure; execution or suicide displaying a ‘direct competition between different forms of sacred authority.’

However, despite this resistance, terror - as the key form of social control, endured, and in the aftermath, the plantocracy aimed to elevate their spiritual as well as temporal control. The ‘spectacle of suffering’ was used to display the further powerlessness of even the most revered Obeah men, Takey’s closest councillors. A report to the House of Commons, depicting the use of severe electric shocks on Obeah men to the extent where one “acknowledged his Master’s Obeah exceeded his own.” Such a display of technology combined with the admission of spiritual superiority, would have reinforced for the onlooking slaves their racial inferiority. It is this objective that is at the centre of the plantocracy’s use of terror. Furthermore, by undermining the cultural practices paramount to the slaves, the white ruling class was able to limit their thoughts of an autonomous social existence: such displays of power reinforced the social and cultural creolization of the slave underclass.

Physical and spiritual power became especially effective as tools of oppression when valorized within a legal framework. The initial Slave Code of 1664, which remained unchanged until 1799, placed “almost no limits on the slaveholders power to ‘correct’ his or her slaves''. This sets a legal precedent for the brutality employed by the plantocracy, and closely aligns the law of the state to that of the master. The 1834 Summary of Cases between 1746 - 1782, is a useful source for analysis of the legal process employed by the plantocracy; and whilst detail was lost throughout the process of summarising each case, the domination of the propertied white man is evident. The white slave owners abused the legal system, as evidenced by the ‘successive criminalization of more and more actions by slaves, from drumming to hunting to gathering after dark.’ This shows the insecurities surrounding any signs of an autonomous existence of slaves and slave culture, especially an existence that could not be manipulated to aid the plantocracy’s interests.

Terror in all its forms was a key instrument of white domination of the social structure. However, the historiography surrounding slave societal structure questions why, with the conditions of slavery, and considering the numerical imbalance, black slaves so infrequently challenged their master’s authority.

Slaves, despite their stringent persecution, were on occasions permitted to live a quasi semi-autonomous existence within the Slave Villages, and it was here that cultural and social dynamics developed and were valued by slaves. Such autonomy allowed black African cultural practices, such as Obeah, to prevail in the face of extensive legal persecution. However, seminal historians Mintz and Hall emphasise the importance of the ‘provisional grounds’ within the Slave Villages as a conscious method of wedding the slaves to the plantation economy and society they despised. The cultivation of small plots of land to produce fruit and vegetables fixed the slaves to an ‘ideology of proto peasant capitalist accumulation’, thus promoting a sense of conservatism for the preservation of their small economic activity and freedoms. This is supported by the importance of land within African and consequently Creole culture, with Thistlewood noting the ’visible grief in all our Negroes’ upon leaving the Egypt plantation. The distribution of ‘provisional lands’ therefore acted as an instrument of social control, by consolidating slaves to their position of subsistence. The white dominance of the legal system further exemplified this, as, whilst emotional ties secured slaves to their plots of land, the attachment to their property from a legal standpoint was merely one of custom. This is a point that Burnard stresses as critical in consolidating the black slave’s powerless social position. Despite the long term goal to rid themselves of the oppressor, each slave's short term aim was survival and this relied on the plantocracy’s tolerance of their control over their property. Their economic autonomy was a facade predicated on white tolerance.

In addition, the protection of slaves' limited property also relied heavily on their white master’s protection. Slave society was largely anarchic, and thieving from fellow slaves was commonplace, to the extent that Burnard describes it as ‘easier to become a property owning individual through thieving’ than through cultivation.’ This contributed to the slave’s conservatism and acceptance of their social positions. Thistlewood used this tool shrewdly, in a spectacle which promoted loyalty from his slaves to ‘their’ plantation: in 1764, whilst Thistelwood’s slaves fished, ‘Ricketts Negroes Come and Robb’d them off the fish’. Despite their owner’s displeasure, ‘Rickett’s Negroes’ were all flogged. This response promoted obedience, and loyalty, not along racial lines but to the plantation and the preservation of their property. Eugene Genovese is correct in suggesting that this was a form of acceptance of each slave’s social position, the act of thieving undermining their shared struggle. Burnard credits such a closed community along plantation lines as a saving grace in maintaining the plantocracy’s hold over Jamaica during Tacky's revolt. Economic conservatism outweighed the slaves' belief in their long term goal of freedom and independence, the power of the plantocracy was so strong and the risks of the loss of the small amount of autonomy so great. The status quo appeared attractive to many slaves.

The plantocracy used women as a key instrument of social control. Slave society was certainly a patriarchy, resulting in the descrimination of slave women on a racial and gendered basis. Recently, this has promoted a revisionist perspective with ‘deepening interest in the lives of slavewomen in studies of slavery ‘. Sexual terror was endured almost exclusively by female slaves, and the white domination over the female body was a key characteristic of the subservience of the black slave. Most significantly, such dominance undermined the growth of familial relationships within the plantation. The usual mode of flogging was to have women ‘held down by several fellow slaves while flogging bare parts of her body.’ The image of the female body being brutalized in such a way became of central importance to the contemporary abolitionist, who stressed the impact it had on the women's children and their husbands by reinforcing their powerless position.

Contrastingly the role women played within slave society also maintained a codependent relationship between master and subordinate male slave: similarly to disputes over ‘provisional grounds,’ masters were the judges of sexual infidelity. It could be argued that one of the pleasures that slaves held onto was sexual relations and therefore this gave the plantocracy power when intervening. A skewed sexual ratio resulted in women being a valuable commodity, and as such, Thistlewood notes the regularity in which he had to intervene; for example London's molestation of Hannah led to Thistlewood “whipp’d London.’ Whilst this promoted a sense of obedience, it also emphasised the total power the masters held over their slaves, as even such base emotions could be controlled. Therefore, consequently, women played a vital role as an instrument of social control, as both a valuable asset which gave slaves a purpose as an emotional luxury, albeit one relying on the permission of their master, reinforcing his power. Simultaneously, the sexual and physical terror women endured supports white notions of dominance in their disregard for femininity through ther punishment and masculinity in thier disregard for previous sexual relations within the slave community, which as Bernard reiterates ‘undermined male slaves patriarchal authority.’