The Plantation Machine - Trevor Burnard The Early Modern Americas

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Cap Français had three charity hospitals, but Port-au-Prince did not get such an institution until 1787, when the governor-general brought state financing to the project.25

      Saint-Domingue’s towns were also the site of its military garrisons, which added both a leavening of high status officers to complement the existing elite of merchants and planters and also a larger number of men of lower status. European troops, however, died quickly in the Greater Antilles. Records from Saint-Domingue in 1765 show a minimal annual death rate of 21 percent among rank-and-file soldiers.26 It did not help that rank-and-file soldiers in the colony were given poor rations and shoddy clothing and were forced to do manual labor outside their military function.27 Slaves and free people of color referred to them as “white slaves” (nègres blancs). Many deserted, often in groups of five or six at a time. In 1766, for example, two weeks after a contingent of 647 soldiers debarked at Cap Français, forty-four of them had already deserted, swelling the growing petit blanc class.28

      Towns were also important in Jamaica, although the English colony had only one large urban area, Kingston. Even the capital, St. Jago de la Vega, also called Spanish Town, was a hamlet, not a substantial town. Kingston was the island’s major port, and trading was so important in Jamaica that in the mid-1750s that Governor Charles Knowles tried unsuccessfully to move the capital there, arguing it was illogical to make ship captains and merchants trek thirteen miles to Spanish Town to conduct business. Knowles also hoped to build a wedge of merchant support in the Assembly against politically powerful planters, who wanted the capital to remain inland. He lost that political battle, but Kingston’s economic and cultural importance remained intact.29

      Kingston may have been an important place of business, but it was, like Port-au-Prince, an unprepossessing place. It was built around a Spanish plan, which placed the formal center of the town—a large square with the parish church at its center and public buildings dotted around it—at some distance from the commercial district. That was Kingston’s real heart, full of bustling streets lined with shops and warehouses, located around a magnificent natural harbor. A map produced in 1745 by Michael Hay shows Kingston when it was probably at the height of its influence (Figure 10). Hay showed a town, dominated by merchants and mercantile houses, which was beginning to expand east of the harbor. The cartographer highlighted that commercial identity in his map by featuring sketches of the houses of four prominent merchants—Edward Gardiner, Robert Turner, Alexander Macfarlane, and Robert Duckinfield. He also outlined, to the southwest of the town, the location where “strangers” and “negroes” were buried and showed the location of the hospital, in “Cheapside,” in the southeast.30

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      Kingston was a practical town, built for business rather than aesthetics, but parts of it were pleasing. In his history of 1774, Long praised the houses in Kingston for their construction and sturdiness, noting they were “mainly of brick, raised two or three stories, conveniently disposed, and in general well-furnished; their roofs are all shingled; the fronts of most of them are shaded with a piazza below, and a covered gallery above.”31 Lord Adam Gordon on a trip to British America in 1764 thought the town “very considerable, being large and well Inhabited, the Streets spacious and regularly laid out,” as befitted “the most … trading Town on the island.”32 But against this were less positive comments. Gordon also noted that Kingston was “a very unwholesome place,” “often visited by sickness.” Long blamed the mortality on the “loathsome practice” of using human excrement to pave the roads and on burying people in too shallow graves near the middle of the town.33 Thomas Hibbert, the town’s greatest merchant, gives some credence to Long’s views. In his notably deist will of 1780 he instructed his executors that “in order to show my detestation and abhorrence of the prevailing superstitious custom of Interning dead bodies in Churches and Church yards and to prevent mine being added to the noxious Mass that is daily Corrupting in the Centre of the Town, I desire that my executors will see it placed in the deep Vault which I have provided for that purpose in the Garden belonging to my House in Kingston with the least expense consistent with decency.”34

      We don’t have a census for 1745 for Kingston, but extrapolating from a census of 1730, when it had 4,461 residents (1,468 whites, 269 free people of color, and 2,724 slaves) and assuming modest growth per annum suggests that by 1745 the town had somewhere between five thousand and six thousand people. There were 844 householders in the town in 1745, suggesting that the average household size was very small—probably not much more than two whites or six free people and slaves per household. Nevertheless, Kingston accounted for 7 percent of Jamaica’s population in 1774. By this time it was the third largest town in British America, with around 14,200 people, more than twice the size of contemporary Cap Français, which had only 6,143 people in 1775.35 More important, just under one-third of white Jamaicans dwelt in Kingston, and 40 percent of free people of color lived there. In contrast, 25 percent of Saint-Domingue’s whites lived in the three largest cities, and less than 10 percent of the free people of color were urban residents.36 Kingston’s population increased rapidly after the American Revolution. By 1788, its 26,478 people meant that it had 12 percent of Jamaica’s population, including 6,539 whites and 3,280 free people of color. Most slaves lived in the countryside, but with 16,659 slaves, Kingston accounted for 7 percent of Jamaica’s enslaved population. Kingston had more slaves and free people of color combined than in all the urban centers of British North America.37

      It was a heterogeneous place. The cacophony of voices and jumble of complexions in Kingston struck observers forcefully. Curtis Brett, a Dubliner from a middling commercial background, who arrived in Kingston from London in 1748, wrote vividly about the heterogeneous character of the town’s population, noting upon arrival, “Instead of the Morning London Cries, of Old Clothes, Sweep, &c. my Ears were saluted with Maha-a, Maha-a, the Cries of Goats, kept in Most Houses for their Milk. And presently I heard called the Names of Pompey, Scipio, Caesar &c. and again those of Yabba, Juba, Quasheba (Negro Boys and Girls, Slaves in the Family) which first raised an Idea of being in old Rome; & then again of my being transported suddenly to Africa.” He thought “the Inhabitants very open, courteous, lively & very ready to serve and assist a stranger. But how different did everything appear to me…. People of almost all colours! White, black, yellow, in abundance. Many pale white, and great Variety in the Shades of Black and Yellow. Very few, not one in a Thousand, of a ruddy Complexion.”38

      Kingston’s great merchants were very wealthy, with the largest leaving estates of more than £100,000 or 230,000 livres. They made their fortunes in several ways. Kingston’s principal business was the importation of African slaves into the Americas, the largest and most complex international business of the eighteenth century.39 Between 1700 and 1758 the city was the sole port of entry for Africans shipped into Jamaica and the major port for such shipments between 1758 and 1807. During this time nearly 830,000 slaves were imported into Jamaica. The total value of this trade amounted to nearly £25 million. Perhaps £200,000 per annum passed through the hands of Kingston merchants. Henry Bright, a Bristol factor resident in Kingston, called the trade to Africa the “chief motive of people venturing their fortunes abroad.”40

      Many of those African captives did not stay in Jamaica but instead were reexported from Kingston as part of the Asiento, or legal slave trade with Spanish America. Richard Sheridan estimates that between 1702 and 1808, 193,597 Africans landing in Jamaica, or 24.4 percent of all captives landed on the island, were immediately shipped onward to Spanish America. The peak years of exportation were between 1710 and 1740, when 42 percent of slaves were reexported. Saint-Domingue had no such reexport sector, and its local merchant class was consequently far less wealthy.

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