If Barbados borrowed its technology from Brazil, why didn’t it also borrow the organization of production?
One answer is the logic of capitalism. It was in the interest of the shippers financing the introduction of sugar production into Barbados to sell as many things as possible to the growers. It was better to sell every farmer some rollers and a set of coppers than it was to sell to only the wealthiest. It was better to tell every farmer he should own slaves than it was for them to enter into shared labor partnerships or recruit cheaper indentured servants that arrived on competing English ships.
The more business transactions, the higher the profits for the Dutch West Indies Company and the merchant bankers in Amsterdam and London. Of course, the fact money had to be leant to finance the purchases, meant merchant bankers were only willing to support the most credit worthy. However, their agents in Bridgetown could always hold the promise of future loans to the poor to discourage them from considering other options.
If this sounds as cynical as the recent efforts by banks to sell and resell mortgages that would never be paid because the profits were in the trades, not the interest, it’s because both are the consequence of a system that values wealth from trade over that from production. And like our current financial crisis, the reasons for the Dutch behavior lay in its recent past.
When Isabella I of Castile married Ferdinand II of Aragon, they consolidated control over most of the Iberian peninsula. In the early years, the Dutch were more interested in competing in the East Indies with Portugal for the spice trade than they were in the New World ruled by Spain.
Ferdinand and Isabella’s daughter, Juana, married into the powerful Hapsburgs of Austria. Her son, Charles V, was Holy Roman Emperor when Martin Luther refused to rescind his 95 theses at the Diet of Worms in 1521. In 1549, Charles changed the status of the lowland provinces along the North Sea from dependencies of individual German princes into his personal domain. Since many supported the Reformation, they were drawn into conflict with Charles, who introduced the Inquisition to strengthen his position in the Seventeen Provinces.
The Protestant provinces rebelled against Charles’ son, Philip II, in 1581. In 1585 Alessandro Farnese seized their central city, Antwerp, and expelled the Protestants. His city of Genoa took over the banking system. The men with knowledge of sugar refining moved to Amsterdam, which became the new trade center.
Charles V had married his first cousin, the sister of the then king of Portugal. In 1581, the same year the Dutch rebelled, Philip inherited the Portuguese throne and banned the Dutch from their traditional trade with Brazil.
The Dutch were traders who had no choice but to exploit changes in market conditions. In 1621 the United Provinces didn’t renew their truce with Spain and instead chartered the Dutch West Indies Company. It immediately began attacking the Spanish controlled sugar lands of Brazil, finally taking power in Recife in 1629. Maurice of Nassau arrived as local governor in 1637. The next year, the company took Sno Paulo de Loanda, the Portugese slave trade center off the coast of Angola.
While the Dutch company put together the pieces to dominate the sugar and slave trades, it only had a few years to exploit its monopoly. The Portuguese regained their independence from Spain in 1640. The Brazilians evicted the Dutch in 1654. Oliver Cromwell passed the first Navigation Act in 1651 that forbade British colonies from using foreign, especially Dutch, carriers. Charles II issued his act in 1660, setting off trade wars between the major powers that destroyed Amsterdam’s monopoly on sugar refining.
It was in the twenty years between the time Portugal became independent and the accession of Charles II that the Dutch were able to develop Barbados as a new market for slaves and a new source for raw materials to feed their sugar refineries. After that, their ships only carried about five to six percent of the slaves.
Notes:
Emmer, Pieter C. The Dutch Slave Trade 1500-1850, 2006, reviewed for Institute of Historical Research website by J. L. Price.
Showing posts with label 31 Barbados (1-5). Show all posts
Showing posts with label 31 Barbados (1-5). Show all posts
Sunday, October 25, 2009
Sunday, October 18, 2009
South Carolina - Sugar Plantations
The biggest contribution Barbados made to South Carolina is the slave-based plantation economy, and all the social and legal controls that flowed from it.
What I’ve never quite understood is why plantations needed to be so large that they required enforced labor, be it indentured servants, captured Indians, or African slaves. It may simply be that size became a status symbol, especially after a few men were able to acquire such large tracts in Tudor Ireland. But, until the introduction of agricultural machinery in the nineteenth century, each additional acre of land brought under cultivation meant a proportional increase in labor hours, which in turn meant management problems that increased exponentially.
I’ve talked to several construction contractors who are puzzled that when their customers double their income doesn’t follow. Instead, they buy more materials, hire more employees, and personally work more hours. It was after that sort of momentum led to an unstable labor force in 1913 that Henry Ford began improving the assembly process itself.
It may be the scarcity of labor that limited the growth of farms in the area where I was raised in Michigan that influences my understanding. The early settlers weren’t that different from those who arrived in Barbados or South Carolina: land speculators and men with limited means, sometimes very junior members of important eastern families, looking for opportunity.
In Cameron, Patricia Averill found those who stayed on their claims for more than a few years became wheat farmers and those that did best usually had sons or other dependent family members to help. The speculators, who didn’t resell immediately, continually mortgaged their lands to newcomers, most of whom moved on, leaving speculators with their land and the accrued wealth from rents.
The first thing farmers needed was access to markets. In the earliest years, they drove wagons a hundred miles to Detroit to sell their harvest to traders shipping it east on Lake Erie and the Erie Canal. They welcomed the state’s efforts to build railroads, and didn’t prosper until those railroads were fully functional.
The second thing they needed was a local mill to grind their wheat for food. At the time, mills were turned by running water, and speculators had claimed all the potential sites before others even saw the land. The mill owners didn’t wish to own all the farm land that produced their raw material, and most farmers didn’t have the technical skills to build and operate their own mills.
From the very beginning, settlers from all economic classes assumed financial transactions would bind them together, that none were sufficient unto themselves.
In contrast, we’re told, when sugar production was introduced to Barbados from Brazil, it brought with it the assumption that each grower would have his own mill, and would need enough acres to justify the mill’s operation. The social structure of the island changed quickly when men with access to capital took over most of the land, and pushed out the men who’d been making a living on small holdings and weren’t willing to work for others for low wages.
Yet, large, self-sufficient plantations with captive labor weren’t inherent with sugar cane. The culture and technology for processing the crop was introduced to the Mediterranean by the Arabs when they expanded west after the death of Mohammed. The Portuguese took cuttings to the island of Madeira and then to Brazil where they improved the milling techniques; Antwerp became the primary refiner.
The large Portugese-Brazilian landowners, the senhores de engenbo, owned the mills which were maintained by skilled tradesmen recruited from Europe. They didn’t expect to raise all the cane needed to make their mills profitable. Instead, they made arrangements with small landowners, the lavradores de cana, to process their cane in exchange for a percentage. They also leased their spare land to poorer men as share croppers.
People at each level of production owned slaves, so slaves lived in smaller units. The wealth was distributed, but so was the risk of poor harvests, and the problems of labor management. To be sure there were contractual problems between mill owners and dependent farmers, but there are always problems when individuals need to co-operate.
The Brazilian model of the 1640's with its community of interest was more like Cameron in the 1830's than it was an antecedent for the self-sufficient, isolated units of South Carolina.
Notes:
Bethell, Leslie. Colonial Brazil, 1987.
What I’ve never quite understood is why plantations needed to be so large that they required enforced labor, be it indentured servants, captured Indians, or African slaves. It may simply be that size became a status symbol, especially after a few men were able to acquire such large tracts in Tudor Ireland. But, until the introduction of agricultural machinery in the nineteenth century, each additional acre of land brought under cultivation meant a proportional increase in labor hours, which in turn meant management problems that increased exponentially.
I’ve talked to several construction contractors who are puzzled that when their customers double their income doesn’t follow. Instead, they buy more materials, hire more employees, and personally work more hours. It was after that sort of momentum led to an unstable labor force in 1913 that Henry Ford began improving the assembly process itself.
It may be the scarcity of labor that limited the growth of farms in the area where I was raised in Michigan that influences my understanding. The early settlers weren’t that different from those who arrived in Barbados or South Carolina: land speculators and men with limited means, sometimes very junior members of important eastern families, looking for opportunity.
In Cameron, Patricia Averill found those who stayed on their claims for more than a few years became wheat farmers and those that did best usually had sons or other dependent family members to help. The speculators, who didn’t resell immediately, continually mortgaged their lands to newcomers, most of whom moved on, leaving speculators with their land and the accrued wealth from rents.
The first thing farmers needed was access to markets. In the earliest years, they drove wagons a hundred miles to Detroit to sell their harvest to traders shipping it east on Lake Erie and the Erie Canal. They welcomed the state’s efforts to build railroads, and didn’t prosper until those railroads were fully functional.
The second thing they needed was a local mill to grind their wheat for food. At the time, mills were turned by running water, and speculators had claimed all the potential sites before others even saw the land. The mill owners didn’t wish to own all the farm land that produced their raw material, and most farmers didn’t have the technical skills to build and operate their own mills.
From the very beginning, settlers from all economic classes assumed financial transactions would bind them together, that none were sufficient unto themselves.
In contrast, we’re told, when sugar production was introduced to Barbados from Brazil, it brought with it the assumption that each grower would have his own mill, and would need enough acres to justify the mill’s operation. The social structure of the island changed quickly when men with access to capital took over most of the land, and pushed out the men who’d been making a living on small holdings and weren’t willing to work for others for low wages.
Yet, large, self-sufficient plantations with captive labor weren’t inherent with sugar cane. The culture and technology for processing the crop was introduced to the Mediterranean by the Arabs when they expanded west after the death of Mohammed. The Portuguese took cuttings to the island of Madeira and then to Brazil where they improved the milling techniques; Antwerp became the primary refiner.
The large Portugese-Brazilian landowners, the senhores de engenbo, owned the mills which were maintained by skilled tradesmen recruited from Europe. They didn’t expect to raise all the cane needed to make their mills profitable. Instead, they made arrangements with small landowners, the lavradores de cana, to process their cane in exchange for a percentage. They also leased their spare land to poorer men as share croppers.
People at each level of production owned slaves, so slaves lived in smaller units. The wealth was distributed, but so was the risk of poor harvests, and the problems of labor management. To be sure there were contractual problems between mill owners and dependent farmers, but there are always problems when individuals need to co-operate.
The Brazilian model of the 1640's with its community of interest was more like Cameron in the 1830's than it was an antecedent for the self-sufficient, isolated units of South Carolina.
Notes:
Bethell, Leslie. Colonial Brazil, 1987.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
South Carolina - Humphrey Walrond
Humphrey Walrond’s rebellion in Barbados occurred more than 350 years ago. Historians can either dismiss the similarities to today’s more extreme conservative activists or argue similar conditions produce similar responses or that there are direct connections from person to person.
In other words, they confront the classic case confronting anthropologists: coincidence, reinvention or diffusion.
In some ways, the psychological case is the easiest to make.
Humphrey Walrond was the oldest son of a junior branch of a family that established itself in Somerset. His grandfather Humphrey had amassed a fortune in Chancery, bought land in the village of Sea, and opened the local grammar school.
When civil war broke out in England, Walrond was 43 with ten children. He showed no particular inclination to serve either side, but later told Parliament he had done what he could to protect his roundhead neighbors from the depredations of the royalists who dominated the countryside.
In 1645 he fell foul of both sides when the nature of the war changed. Parliament had wearied of protracted warfare that depended on local militias, and established the New Model Army as a professional force, an action akin to Lincoln’s when he elevated Grant, Sherman and Sheridan in our civil war. The first forays under Thomas Fairfax were in Walrond’s area.
As Fairfax neared, the royalist hounded Walrond from his home. He fled to the nearest fortified town, Bridgewater, which Fairfax soon made his first example of Parliamentary resolve by laying siege to the castle and lobbing fire bombs that destroyed much of the town.
Walrond was among the fifty gentlemen taken prisoner when the town was defeated, sent to Gatehouse, and stripped of his property. His oldest son, George, lost as arm sometime fighting for the royalists. When his petitions to Parliament were refused, he sold his property and moved to Barbados.
The town’s local historian, James Street, observed the "Col. Walrond, across the Atlantic, was (as we have said) a strangely different character" than he had been in Sea."
He used every method of the roundheads - legislative maneuvers, war, sequestration of estates, purification of all but the most loyal - to destroy representatives of the men he felt had wrongly punished him. He borrowed the oaths of the Stuarts, but was more an inversion of the men he felt had destroyed him than he was a royalist.
His ally in Barbados, Francis Willoughby underwent the same psychological transformation. During the war, he fought for Parliament, but in 1647, after Charles I had been defeated, he supported Parliament in its disputes with the New Model Army. When the army took London, he was jailed for six months, then fled to Holland to support Charles I.
Once Willoughby took control in Barbados from Walrond, he appeased the moderate royalists, who wished to remain isolated from England’s wars. However, when the banished landowners continued to sponsor partisan accounts of Walrond’s activities, Darnell Davis says Willoughby confused the personal with the political and redirected his anger from the Commonwealth toward anyone who disagreed with him.
As the blockade continued, he nursed his grievance, and wrote his wife "since they began so deeply with me, as to take away all at one clap, and without any cause given on my part, I am resolved not to sit down a loser and be content to see thee, my children, and self ruined."
With no sense of the realities of a plantation economy that had always depended on trade for most of its food, he believed they "can neither starve us with cold, nor famish us with hunger" and so told her "If ever they get the Island, it shall cost them more than it is worth before they have it." It was this indifference to ruin that led moderate royalists to abandon his cause.
The two men, both sons who had inherited to follow the lines of their caste, were shocked when their reflexive responses not only weren’t adequate, but judged wrong when circumstances changed in unexpected ways. They reacted a bit like war prisoners today who internalize some of the attributes of their tormenters at the same time they lose any sense of causality in the outside world.
When Charles II was made king in 1660, Willoughby returned to Barbados, with Walrond as his assistant. By the end of the year, Walrond had displaced him and began prosecuting Thomas Modyford for treason, unmindful of the fact the moderate royalist was related to the man who helped engineer the restoration of the Stuarts, George Monck.
Walrond was expelled again in 1662, and a year later charged with trading with Spain in violation of the Navigation Laws his behavior in Barbados had prompted Parliament to introduce. During his previous exile from Barbados, he had offered his services to Spain, which then was putting down rebellions in Catalonia and Portugal. He angered everyone in England, but managed to leave his son George the most necessary inheritance of a royalist, a title, albeit the Spanish Marquis of Vallado, and debt.
Willoughby never returned to civilian life, but died in battle with the Dutch in 1666.
Notes:
Davis, Nicholas Darnell. The Cavaliers & Roundheads of Barbados, 1650-1652, 1887, quotes Willoughby’s letter.
Street, James. The Mynster of the Ile, Or, the Story of the Ancient Parish of Ilminster, 1904.
In other words, they confront the classic case confronting anthropologists: coincidence, reinvention or diffusion.
In some ways, the psychological case is the easiest to make.
Humphrey Walrond was the oldest son of a junior branch of a family that established itself in Somerset. His grandfather Humphrey had amassed a fortune in Chancery, bought land in the village of Sea, and opened the local grammar school.
When civil war broke out in England, Walrond was 43 with ten children. He showed no particular inclination to serve either side, but later told Parliament he had done what he could to protect his roundhead neighbors from the depredations of the royalists who dominated the countryside.
In 1645 he fell foul of both sides when the nature of the war changed. Parliament had wearied of protracted warfare that depended on local militias, and established the New Model Army as a professional force, an action akin to Lincoln’s when he elevated Grant, Sherman and Sheridan in our civil war. The first forays under Thomas Fairfax were in Walrond’s area.
As Fairfax neared, the royalist hounded Walrond from his home. He fled to the nearest fortified town, Bridgewater, which Fairfax soon made his first example of Parliamentary resolve by laying siege to the castle and lobbing fire bombs that destroyed much of the town.
Walrond was among the fifty gentlemen taken prisoner when the town was defeated, sent to Gatehouse, and stripped of his property. His oldest son, George, lost as arm sometime fighting for the royalists. When his petitions to Parliament were refused, he sold his property and moved to Barbados.
The town’s local historian, James Street, observed the "Col. Walrond, across the Atlantic, was (as we have said) a strangely different character" than he had been in Sea."
He used every method of the roundheads - legislative maneuvers, war, sequestration of estates, purification of all but the most loyal - to destroy representatives of the men he felt had wrongly punished him. He borrowed the oaths of the Stuarts, but was more an inversion of the men he felt had destroyed him than he was a royalist.
His ally in Barbados, Francis Willoughby underwent the same psychological transformation. During the war, he fought for Parliament, but in 1647, after Charles I had been defeated, he supported Parliament in its disputes with the New Model Army. When the army took London, he was jailed for six months, then fled to Holland to support Charles I.
Once Willoughby took control in Barbados from Walrond, he appeased the moderate royalists, who wished to remain isolated from England’s wars. However, when the banished landowners continued to sponsor partisan accounts of Walrond’s activities, Darnell Davis says Willoughby confused the personal with the political and redirected his anger from the Commonwealth toward anyone who disagreed with him.
As the blockade continued, he nursed his grievance, and wrote his wife "since they began so deeply with me, as to take away all at one clap, and without any cause given on my part, I am resolved not to sit down a loser and be content to see thee, my children, and self ruined."
With no sense of the realities of a plantation economy that had always depended on trade for most of its food, he believed they "can neither starve us with cold, nor famish us with hunger" and so told her "If ever they get the Island, it shall cost them more than it is worth before they have it." It was this indifference to ruin that led moderate royalists to abandon his cause.
The two men, both sons who had inherited to follow the lines of their caste, were shocked when their reflexive responses not only weren’t adequate, but judged wrong when circumstances changed in unexpected ways. They reacted a bit like war prisoners today who internalize some of the attributes of their tormenters at the same time they lose any sense of causality in the outside world.
When Charles II was made king in 1660, Willoughby returned to Barbados, with Walrond as his assistant. By the end of the year, Walrond had displaced him and began prosecuting Thomas Modyford for treason, unmindful of the fact the moderate royalist was related to the man who helped engineer the restoration of the Stuarts, George Monck.
Walrond was expelled again in 1662, and a year later charged with trading with Spain in violation of the Navigation Laws his behavior in Barbados had prompted Parliament to introduce. During his previous exile from Barbados, he had offered his services to Spain, which then was putting down rebellions in Catalonia and Portugal. He angered everyone in England, but managed to leave his son George the most necessary inheritance of a royalist, a title, albeit the Spanish Marquis of Vallado, and debt.
Willoughby never returned to civilian life, but died in battle with the Dutch in 1666.
Notes:
Davis, Nicholas Darnell. The Cavaliers & Roundheads of Barbados, 1650-1652, 1887, quotes Willoughby’s letter.
Street, James. The Mynster of the Ile, Or, the Story of the Ancient Parish of Ilminster, 1904.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
South Carolina - Humphrey Waldron’s Rebellion
Humphrey Walrond’s royalist revolt on Barbados in 1650 is the first instance of the deliberate use of lies and threats of violence to overcome the will of the legal majority that I know might have influenced South Carolina.
When England tried, sentenced and executed Charles I in 1649, Barbados was a fragile society. Slavery was still new and the mechanisms for control weren’t yet in place. Indentured servants had plotted rebellion in 1647. In September of 1649, Oliver Cromwell told Parliament he had executed every tenth soldier captured at Drogheda and sent the rest to Barbados along with Catholic soldiers caught in other Irish towns.
The recent, unwilling arrivals had not yet been absorbed by a society that was rapidly converting to slave labor nor had many yet had the opportunity to remigrate to newly opened islands like Antigua. Any references made by agitators to violent rebellion or enslavement were heard against this background.
Land title on the island was dependent on the Lord Proprietor, and through him, on the English government which granted him a charter. In 1648, Francis Willoughby assumed the Barbados patent when he paid some debts of the current Earl of Carlisle. James Hay’s son James then revoked the appointment of Philip Bell as governor. Willoughby had appointed no successor and Bell was still in place.
Not only was there no legitimate chain of authority, most landowners realized their titles ultimately depended on the good will of the government that was still being petitioned by the creditors of William Courteen, who claimed his grant had priority over that of Hays-Willoughby. Most Barbadians wished to offend as few people as possible in England and so wished to remain neutral.
The Walrond rebellion began in Bermuda in 1649 when royalists overthrew the governor and replaced him with one who refused the request for loyalty from the Commonwealth’s Council of State and declared Charles I’s son Charles the legitimate power in England. They also banished the Independents to the Bahamas.
The term Independent was used for any dissident from the Anglican church, including a number of Puritans sent by the chief shareholder in the Somers Isle Company, Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick. Their rebellion was then against both the state and their landlord.
Bermuda sent agents to the wealthier Barbados asking it to support Charles Stuart and join a mutual defense alliance. Royalists on the island favored the Bermudans, but one of the largest landowners, James Drax, convinced the government it could sell arms but should remain neutral.
Walrond began plotting against Drax, who he began calling an Independent, and infiltrating the key positions in the civil government. The treasurer, Guy Molesworth, was banished for his alleged role in the servant plot two years earlier. William Byam, recently deported from the Tower of London, was made treasurer and Master of the Magazines. Molesworth told Parliament that Drax was responsible for the false rumors.
By mid April, moderate royalists like Thomas Modyford, who were concerned that Walrond’s continued maneuvering for recognition of Charles Stuart could ruin the island, proposed a widely support Act for Uniting the Inhabitants of the Island under the Government which simply required every citizen obey the island’s government.
Walrond’s lawyer brother, Edward, added inflammatory language that anyone who attended an Independent service or did not attend communion should be sentenced for three months on the first offence, and then banished if he persisted.
Drax suggested to Bell that he should call an election for the General Assembly that, in effect, would be a referendum on the Modyford-Walrond bill. Humphrey Walrond responded with libelous broadsheets against Drax, each more scurrilous. He finally wrote the men who petitioned for an election:
"are Independents, their aim is wholly to Cashier the Gentry...and change for our Peace War, and for our Unity Division. Colonel Drax that devout Zealot (of the deeds of the Devil and the cause of the seven headed Dragon of Westminster) is the Agent...I have vowed to impeach him and prosecute him, but not in point of Law; for then I know he would subdue me (but at the point of Sword;)..against the pretense of Liberty, for thereby is meant Slavery and Tyranny" [Spelling modernized, emphasis added]
Walrond then began gathering armed men to force the governor, Philip Bell, to proclaim Charles king. When Bell wasn’t able to gather an equally strong military, he acquiesced at a showdown on the outskirts of Bridgetown. The next day, Francis Willoughby appeared in the harbor, talked with Bell and agreed to return in three months to assume power.
That gave Walrond time to deport as many people as he could, including Drax. Some of the wealthier men went to London to explain conditions to the Council of State. Inevitably, the Commonwealth declared the island in revolt and, in 1651, dispatched a fleet to blockade, then subdue the rebels.
Willoughby grew increasingly angry with the banished landowners, and seized more estates to pay for war. Men began to question the validity of Willoughby and Walrond’s claims of a vast, Roundhead conspiracy. Others, no doubt including the Roman Catholic refugees, grew less comfortable with the demands for religious conformity.
In December, Modyford began negotiating with Cromwell’s representative, George Ayscue. When Willoughby refused any treaties, Modyford raised a thousand men to match Willoughby’s thousand. The two armies spent several days in the rain in January, 1652, contemplating battle, which would necessarily have been war between neighbors, before Willoughby surrendered.
The treaty forgave as many actions as possible, and only made one action the grounds for future prosecution:
"the main and chief cause of our late troubles and miseries has grown by lose, base and uncivil language, tending to sedition and derision, too commonly used among many people here: it is there further agreed that at the next General Assembly a strict law be made against all such persons, with a heavy penalty to be inflicted upon them that shall be guilty of any reviling speeches of what nature soever, by remembering or raveling into former differences, and reproaching any man with the cause he has formerly defended." [emphasis added]
In March, Willougby banished the still threatening Walrond, his brother Edward, Byam and several more of their hard core supporters, but not before the pattern of minority subversion through threat of force and intemperate language was set.
Notes: Nicholas Darnell Davis, The Cavaliers & Roundheads of Barbados, 1650-1652, 1887 and available on-line, is the best place to start understanding the rebellion. More recent historians, no doubt, correct his errors and provide better analysis, but they offer less clear chronologies.
When England tried, sentenced and executed Charles I in 1649, Barbados was a fragile society. Slavery was still new and the mechanisms for control weren’t yet in place. Indentured servants had plotted rebellion in 1647. In September of 1649, Oliver Cromwell told Parliament he had executed every tenth soldier captured at Drogheda and sent the rest to Barbados along with Catholic soldiers caught in other Irish towns.
The recent, unwilling arrivals had not yet been absorbed by a society that was rapidly converting to slave labor nor had many yet had the opportunity to remigrate to newly opened islands like Antigua. Any references made by agitators to violent rebellion or enslavement were heard against this background.
Land title on the island was dependent on the Lord Proprietor, and through him, on the English government which granted him a charter. In 1648, Francis Willoughby assumed the Barbados patent when he paid some debts of the current Earl of Carlisle. James Hay’s son James then revoked the appointment of Philip Bell as governor. Willoughby had appointed no successor and Bell was still in place.
Not only was there no legitimate chain of authority, most landowners realized their titles ultimately depended on the good will of the government that was still being petitioned by the creditors of William Courteen, who claimed his grant had priority over that of Hays-Willoughby. Most Barbadians wished to offend as few people as possible in England and so wished to remain neutral.
The Walrond rebellion began in Bermuda in 1649 when royalists overthrew the governor and replaced him with one who refused the request for loyalty from the Commonwealth’s Council of State and declared Charles I’s son Charles the legitimate power in England. They also banished the Independents to the Bahamas.
The term Independent was used for any dissident from the Anglican church, including a number of Puritans sent by the chief shareholder in the Somers Isle Company, Robert Rich, the Earl of Warwick. Their rebellion was then against both the state and their landlord.
Bermuda sent agents to the wealthier Barbados asking it to support Charles Stuart and join a mutual defense alliance. Royalists on the island favored the Bermudans, but one of the largest landowners, James Drax, convinced the government it could sell arms but should remain neutral.
Walrond began plotting against Drax, who he began calling an Independent, and infiltrating the key positions in the civil government. The treasurer, Guy Molesworth, was banished for his alleged role in the servant plot two years earlier. William Byam, recently deported from the Tower of London, was made treasurer and Master of the Magazines. Molesworth told Parliament that Drax was responsible for the false rumors.
By mid April, moderate royalists like Thomas Modyford, who were concerned that Walrond’s continued maneuvering for recognition of Charles Stuart could ruin the island, proposed a widely support Act for Uniting the Inhabitants of the Island under the Government which simply required every citizen obey the island’s government.
Walrond’s lawyer brother, Edward, added inflammatory language that anyone who attended an Independent service or did not attend communion should be sentenced for three months on the first offence, and then banished if he persisted.
Drax suggested to Bell that he should call an election for the General Assembly that, in effect, would be a referendum on the Modyford-Walrond bill. Humphrey Walrond responded with libelous broadsheets against Drax, each more scurrilous. He finally wrote the men who petitioned for an election:
"are Independents, their aim is wholly to Cashier the Gentry...and change for our Peace War, and for our Unity Division. Colonel Drax that devout Zealot (of the deeds of the Devil and the cause of the seven headed Dragon of Westminster) is the Agent...I have vowed to impeach him and prosecute him, but not in point of Law; for then I know he would subdue me (but at the point of Sword;)..against the pretense of Liberty, for thereby is meant Slavery and Tyranny" [Spelling modernized, emphasis added]
Walrond then began gathering armed men to force the governor, Philip Bell, to proclaim Charles king. When Bell wasn’t able to gather an equally strong military, he acquiesced at a showdown on the outskirts of Bridgetown. The next day, Francis Willoughby appeared in the harbor, talked with Bell and agreed to return in three months to assume power.
That gave Walrond time to deport as many people as he could, including Drax. Some of the wealthier men went to London to explain conditions to the Council of State. Inevitably, the Commonwealth declared the island in revolt and, in 1651, dispatched a fleet to blockade, then subdue the rebels.
Willoughby grew increasingly angry with the banished landowners, and seized more estates to pay for war. Men began to question the validity of Willoughby and Walrond’s claims of a vast, Roundhead conspiracy. Others, no doubt including the Roman Catholic refugees, grew less comfortable with the demands for religious conformity.
In December, Modyford began negotiating with Cromwell’s representative, George Ayscue. When Willoughby refused any treaties, Modyford raised a thousand men to match Willoughby’s thousand. The two armies spent several days in the rain in January, 1652, contemplating battle, which would necessarily have been war between neighbors, before Willoughby surrendered.
The treaty forgave as many actions as possible, and only made one action the grounds for future prosecution:
"the main and chief cause of our late troubles and miseries has grown by lose, base and uncivil language, tending to sedition and derision, too commonly used among many people here: it is there further agreed that at the next General Assembly a strict law be made against all such persons, with a heavy penalty to be inflicted upon them that shall be guilty of any reviling speeches of what nature soever, by remembering or raveling into former differences, and reproaching any man with the cause he has formerly defended." [emphasis added]
In March, Willougby banished the still threatening Walrond, his brother Edward, Byam and several more of their hard core supporters, but not before the pattern of minority subversion through threat of force and intemperate language was set.
Notes: Nicholas Darnell Davis, The Cavaliers & Roundheads of Barbados, 1650-1652, 1887 and available on-line, is the best place to start understanding the rebellion. More recent historians, no doubt, correct his errors and provide better analysis, but they offer less clear chronologies.
Sunday, August 30, 2009
South Carolina - Barbados
South Carolina’s history begins with the ambitions of men who looked to the Caribbean islands where Spain was generating so much wealth. In 1625, soon after the Virginia Company started settling North American, men financed by London merchant William Courteen landed on Barbados, far east in the Lesser Antilles near the coast of South America.
The early years were spent attracting settlers and finding a commercial crop to pay their rents to Courteen and then the Earl of Carlisle, James Hay, who granted 10,000 acres to London merchants to repay his own debts. James Holdrip arrived in 1629 as Hay’s agent, but instead acquired 1,000 acres of his own.
Karl Watson says that within 20 years, there were 11,200 farms and plantations on the 166 square mile island, before much of the interior was cleared of forest. In 1650, Larry Gragg says 75% of the holdings were less than 50 acres and 21% less than 10 acres with a population of 23,000 in 1655.
Much of the early labor came from indentured servants, many of them young tradesmen who shipped from Bristol. They probably are the ones who bought small pieces of land when they had earned their freedom, and may have resold even smaller, unregistered pieces to increase their own capital.
The principal export was tobacco, a labor intensive crop that can be cultivated on small tracts. However, the leaf quality was poor, and prices fell when better tobacco from Virginia flooded the London market and civil war broke out in England between Parliament and the forces supporting the king, Charles I, in 1642.
Earlier, the Dutch West Indies Company had introduced sugar cultivation and African slave labor into the eastern horn of Brazil known as Pernambuco. In the ongoing wars for supremacy between European powers that form the background of many colonial enterprises, the Dutch took control of that section of Brazil in 1630 and built the port of Recife.
Holdrip and James Drax were the first to attempt to grow sugar commercially on Barbados in the early 1640's. Drax solved the first critical problem, converting the cane into something which could be shipped profitably, when he imported a mill and distilling apparatus along with someone with knowledge from that Dutch enterprise.
The other problems were amassing enough land to make the mill cost effective and controlling the labor to do the hard work of clearing and maintaining land. The Dutch had already learned the maximum acreage in northeastern Brazil was about 1500 acres, according to David Watts. Men began clearing the interior and buying out smaller land holders. In 1640 Drax owned 400 acres; in 1654 he had 700 acres worked by 200 African slaves.
The conversion to a capital intensive crop that depended on African slave labor occurred just as the English Civil war was sending men to the island who had lost any wealth they might have had. In 1646, captured supporters of Charles I were sentenced to the island as servants, followed by officers from both sides. Irish rebels captured at Drogheda in 1649 were exiled, as were the prisoners taken in the closing battles of 1649. Men who supported Penruddock's uprising in Somerset were sent in 1655.
Meantime, the Portuguese retook Pernambuco from the Dutch in 1654, exiling the very people who best understood how to grow sugar cane profitably. Some, at least, immigrated to Barbados. In 1668, the Netherlands took over Surinam, which gave the Dutch refugees a new home and sent some of the English settlers who grew sugar there to Barbados.
Dutch merchants were more interested in underwriting the sugar trade, than they were in producing the crop, and so advanced credit to those who could provide them the necessary collateral. They naturally favored the larger land owners trying to buy or clear land over the ones just rising above subsistence. At the time, people claimed 10,000 left between 1645 and 1665 for newly opened islands, a number Archibald Thornton thinks exaggerated. Still, the racial composition of the population changed from 86% white in 1643 to 34% in 1664.
Neither Cromwell nor Charles condoned the trade with the Dutch, and the efforts of each hindered the efforts of men trying to grow sugar. Planters continued to squabble over the competing grants made to Courteen and Hay until Charles II expropriated the island in 1663 and imposed a yearly tax.
By the middle 1660's, there probably wasn’t a person on the volatile island who didn’t have a personal grievance against an action by some form of the British government. Such tales of personal loss are the ones passed on within families that propel and exaggerate the quarrels of the past into the future, especially among those families who don’t have newer, more positive experiences to replace them.
Notes:
Gragg, Larry Dale. Englishmen Transplanted: the English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660, 2003.
Thornton, Archibald Paton. "The Organization of the Slave Trade in the English West Indies, 1660-1685," The William and Mary Quarterly 12:399-409:1955.
Watson, Karl. "Slavery and Economy in Barbados," BBC website 1 May 2001.
Watts, David. The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492, 1990.
The early years were spent attracting settlers and finding a commercial crop to pay their rents to Courteen and then the Earl of Carlisle, James Hay, who granted 10,000 acres to London merchants to repay his own debts. James Holdrip arrived in 1629 as Hay’s agent, but instead acquired 1,000 acres of his own.
Karl Watson says that within 20 years, there were 11,200 farms and plantations on the 166 square mile island, before much of the interior was cleared of forest. In 1650, Larry Gragg says 75% of the holdings were less than 50 acres and 21% less than 10 acres with a population of 23,000 in 1655.
Much of the early labor came from indentured servants, many of them young tradesmen who shipped from Bristol. They probably are the ones who bought small pieces of land when they had earned their freedom, and may have resold even smaller, unregistered pieces to increase their own capital.
The principal export was tobacco, a labor intensive crop that can be cultivated on small tracts. However, the leaf quality was poor, and prices fell when better tobacco from Virginia flooded the London market and civil war broke out in England between Parliament and the forces supporting the king, Charles I, in 1642.
Earlier, the Dutch West Indies Company had introduced sugar cultivation and African slave labor into the eastern horn of Brazil known as Pernambuco. In the ongoing wars for supremacy between European powers that form the background of many colonial enterprises, the Dutch took control of that section of Brazil in 1630 and built the port of Recife.
Holdrip and James Drax were the first to attempt to grow sugar commercially on Barbados in the early 1640's. Drax solved the first critical problem, converting the cane into something which could be shipped profitably, when he imported a mill and distilling apparatus along with someone with knowledge from that Dutch enterprise.
The other problems were amassing enough land to make the mill cost effective and controlling the labor to do the hard work of clearing and maintaining land. The Dutch had already learned the maximum acreage in northeastern Brazil was about 1500 acres, according to David Watts. Men began clearing the interior and buying out smaller land holders. In 1640 Drax owned 400 acres; in 1654 he had 700 acres worked by 200 African slaves.
The conversion to a capital intensive crop that depended on African slave labor occurred just as the English Civil war was sending men to the island who had lost any wealth they might have had. In 1646, captured supporters of Charles I were sentenced to the island as servants, followed by officers from both sides. Irish rebels captured at Drogheda in 1649 were exiled, as were the prisoners taken in the closing battles of 1649. Men who supported Penruddock's uprising in Somerset were sent in 1655.
Meantime, the Portuguese retook Pernambuco from the Dutch in 1654, exiling the very people who best understood how to grow sugar cane profitably. Some, at least, immigrated to Barbados. In 1668, the Netherlands took over Surinam, which gave the Dutch refugees a new home and sent some of the English settlers who grew sugar there to Barbados.
Dutch merchants were more interested in underwriting the sugar trade, than they were in producing the crop, and so advanced credit to those who could provide them the necessary collateral. They naturally favored the larger land owners trying to buy or clear land over the ones just rising above subsistence. At the time, people claimed 10,000 left between 1645 and 1665 for newly opened islands, a number Archibald Thornton thinks exaggerated. Still, the racial composition of the population changed from 86% white in 1643 to 34% in 1664.
Neither Cromwell nor Charles condoned the trade with the Dutch, and the efforts of each hindered the efforts of men trying to grow sugar. Planters continued to squabble over the competing grants made to Courteen and Hay until Charles II expropriated the island in 1663 and imposed a yearly tax.
By the middle 1660's, there probably wasn’t a person on the volatile island who didn’t have a personal grievance against an action by some form of the British government. Such tales of personal loss are the ones passed on within families that propel and exaggerate the quarrels of the past into the future, especially among those families who don’t have newer, more positive experiences to replace them.
Notes:
Gragg, Larry Dale. Englishmen Transplanted: the English Colonization of Barbados, 1627-1660, 2003.
Thornton, Archibald Paton. "The Organization of the Slave Trade in the English West Indies, 1660-1685," The William and Mary Quarterly 12:399-409:1955.
Watson, Karl. "Slavery and Economy in Barbados," BBC website 1 May 2001.
Watts, David. The West Indies: Patterns of Development, Culture and Environmental Change since 1492, 1990.
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