of female captives brought unwelcome interventions in the intimate lives of enslaved men and women. In addition to stocking their plantations with females they perceived as the “best breeding” people, Jamaican planters intervened in the sexual lives of enslaved men and women to capitalize on the reproductive promise of their purchases. Planters’ reproductive interventions not only contrasted with policies proposed by abolitionists, they also conflicted with enslaved people’s own views about the formation of sexual partnerships. The clash that would erupt between enslaver and enslaved reflected the authority slave owners claimed over the bodies of people they owned and the power enslaved people claimed to control their bodies.
Strategies for Breeding: Sex and Age Preferences
Between 1788 and 1807, sugar estate owners and managers aimed to buy females in far greater numbers than in previous decades in order to achieve parity between the sexes or, in some cases, to obtain more women than men. The absentee proprietor of Amity Hall estate, Henry Goulburn, implored his attorney, Thomas Samson, to “purchase [more] women in preference to males until the numbers of each are equal.” This method of buying, Goulburn explained, was the “means alone that we shall be able to keep our stock without diminution.”10 In another planter’s view, a major obstacle to successfully increasing birthrates was that the estates had “a great many more men than women.”11 An examination of the transatlantic slave trade database confirms that males were likely to outnumber females on Jamaican sugar estates because of a greater number of males traded. In the twenty-year period before the start of Britain’s national campaign to shut down the African labor supply (1769–88), males steadily accounted for at least 60 percent of imported workers (Figure 2a). This pattern persisted into the last twenty years of the trade’s legal existence (1788–1808) with some years showing a 60 to 70 percent purchase of males (Figure 2b).
Figure 2a. Sex and Age Ratio, Jamaica, 1769–87. Source: Data compiled from Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (2009), http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed January 29, 2012).
While the slave trade database confirms preponderance of males, individual plantation records of annual slave increase and decrease show a narrower, and sometimes nonexistent, gap between males and females. Records for Worthy Park estate, for example, consistently show that males never outnumbered females by more than 5 percent in any given year between 1784 and 1796 (Figure 3). Similar patterns emerge for Golden Grove estate that show some years when females outnumbered males and other years when only a few slaves accounted for the sex ratio gap (Figure 4). For example, in 1768, the 50.1 percent females (184) surpassed the 49.8 percent males (183). In June 1792, the period that listed the greatest proportion of males (248), the property needed only a 4.7 percent increase in females (205) to achieve sexual parity.
Figure 2b. Sex and Age Ratio, Jamaica, 1788–1808. Source: Data compiled from Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database (2009), http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed January 29, 2012).
A demographic history of Jamaica’s slave population between 1807 and 1834 not only confirms a small skewed sex ratio in favor of men, it also reveals that in many cases the proportion of women exceeded men on sugar plantations.12 The slave population profile of Jamaica in 1817, the earliest year with comprehensive census data, reveals a ratio of 117.8 males to 100 females among the African-born population, and 91.4 males to 100 females among the island-born population (Creoles). While the overall sex ratio confirms that Jamaican buyers consistently imported more African males than females, the mortality rate among men was higher. An excessive death rate for males was especially true in the parishes where sugar plantations dominated and had the largest concentration of unfree workers. With the exception of only St. Thomas-in-the-East Parish, the female population surpassed the male population in all the sugar-producing parishes, many of which were home to the estates examined in this study, including Trewlany, St. John, and St. James. Males outnumbered females because of lower male mortality rates in other Jamaican parishes such as Manchester, St. Ann, St. Thomas-in-the-Vale, St. Mary, Port Royal, and St. George, where enslaved workers cultivated other crops and were engaged in diverse economic activities, like pimento and coffee growing as well as livestock rearing. Parishes with larger urban centers like St. Catherine and Kingston show the widest gap in sex ratios, with females outnumbering males by almost twenty to one. Urban economies depended on trade, manufacture, and domestic service, in which more women worked than in agriculture, which dominated the rural parishes. The problem plaguing sugar plantations was not so much a lack of women in general, but rather a deficiency of young women of childbearing age. The relatively quick pace at which the gender gap closed on the sugar estates when buying patterns had not shifted radically in favor of females reflects an aging population of women who outlived men.
Figure 3. Sex Ratio on Worthy Park Estate, 1784–96. Source: Compiled from Michael Craton, Searching for the Invisible Man: Slaves and Plantation Life in Jamaica (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978), 81.
Figure 4. Sex Ratio on Golden Grove Estate, 1765–1810. Source: Compiled from Betty Wood and T. R. Clayton, “Slave Birth, Death and Disease on Golden Grove Plantation, Jamaica, 1765–1810,” Slavery and Abolition 6, no. 2 (1985): 99–121.
This demographic study further reveals a consistent gap in the age group fifteen to twenty-five across Jamaican parishes. The bulk of the slave population fell between ages twenty-five to forty-four. As one historian noted, “A common feature of the total populations was an erosion of the age pyramid between about 15 and 25 years.”13 Individual estates like Golden Grove reflect this pattern; 5.6 percent of its women were above age seventy, well beyond childbearing age. Girls with greatest reproductive promise, aged nine to seventeen, accounted for another 42 of 204 females at Golden Grove estate. Most women were field workers with “reputed age”14 between thirty and seventy years and therefore had a much lower reproductive potential.15 The age compositions of these properties tell us that the most pressing need was for greater proportions of women capable of bearing children. Francis Graham, attorney for Georgia estate, made this argument to his absentee employer, the owner of the property, Thomas Miller, when he explained why workers failed to reproduce. The estate simply had too many “old Gangs,” Graham wrote, and the only way to stimulate population growth was to buy young women.16
Proprietors and attorneys attempted to alter not just the sex ratio of their populations but also the youth profiles of female slaves. In 1804, Rowland Fearon, the Jamaican-based attorney who managed Lord Penrhyn’s sugar estates, promised to buy “as many young girls,” more specifically, “growing women,” for the property.17 Other planters were more precise in defining what constituted young, “growing women.” The planter-historian William Beckford summarized, “age twelve to sixteen is in my opinion, the age group that is most likely to answer the future” reproductive needs.18 Females between ages twelve to sixteen were far “too young” to suit Simon Taylor, because they were more vulnerable to sexual abuse. “If girls are bought too young,” Taylor explained, “the fellows play the very devil with them, but after they are 16 or 18 there is no [sexual] danger.”19 Thomas Barritt, attorney at two estates belonging to Nathaniel Phillips, expressed a similar concern. Men (race unspecified) frequently lured the “young wenches” away from the estates. Unsuspecting young girls inveigled by men into “bad habits” were “being disordered.”20