Bought & Sold: Scotland, Jamaica and Slavery

Preface: Freeing our minds

BOB MARLEY SINGS about the painful abuse that enslaved Africans suffered and the damage of slavery which lives to this day, a hangover from events long ago. His songs claim that we cannot properly understand and put right false ideas that we do not acknowledge. He makes a plea to all of us to ‘emancipate ourselves’ and understand that we need to ‘free our minds’.

The Black Lives Matter campaign has rightly drawn attention to the role of prominent Scots in slavery and the way some of these people are still celebrated in our street names and statues. It seems to be the right moment to revisit that period in our history and ask what the people of Scotland thought. How widespread was the belief that ‘Black lives’ did not particularly matter?

Before Europeans began buying large numbers of enslaved people in Africa, dark-skinned people were simply people. Before the 1700s, when my telling of this story begins, society judged status by wealth and ownership of land. The wealthy were high class; the poor were looked down upon. Those of a different religion were regularly discriminated against, even hated at times, but skin colour was of very little significance. ‘Black’ and ‘white’ differences were invented for a particular purpose.

This book uses two small countries, Scotland and Jamaica, to trace the story of how and why many Scots became involved for well over a hundred years in the buying and selling of humans and the crucial change this commerce made to our society, including our understanding of ourselves. As the book explains, the slave trade was vigorously defended by attitudes and beliefs that cascaded down through the generations to produce the long-lasting consequence of widespread racism.

It is worth reminding ourselves about the economic importance of slavery. Although Jamaica is a very small island, throughout the 1700s sugar production by hundreds of thousands of enslaved Africans made the island Britain’s most wealthy colony by far. It was worth more than all the tobacco from Virginia, indeed more than the whole produce of North America, to the British economy. Taxes on sugar imports and personal taxes collected from Jamaican slave owners and traders, together with massive transfers of private wealth, were worth many millions to the British economy.

In the 1660s, there were already several sugar refineries on the Clyde in Glasgow. The implementation of English laws principally intended to keep the Spanish and French from ‘stealing’ England’s lucrative overseas trade began to squeeze out the many Scottish merchants. Though subjects of the same king, they were interloping foreigners when it came to trade, unlawfully busy making money in the Caribbean. The 1707 Act of Union which joined Scotland to England specifically addressed this question, giving Scots full rights to trade and settle in the British colonies. The Scots took advantage of this opportunity, becoming major players in and around Jamaica. In the 18th century, control over enslaved Africans on the lucrative island of Jamaica became very important to Scotland’s prosperity. For some idea of how high the stakes were, the legislation which brought slavery in the British colonies to an end included a government payment of the modern equivalent of £2.3 billion (using Bank of England figures) in personal compensation to former slave owners, about 20 per cent of which went to people living in Scotland.

When I set out to write this book, it was not my intention to write a polemic on Black lives in Jamaica. I will leave that to a person for whom racism is lived reality. I could have written an academic text, a ‘whole history’ packed full of relevant academic references and arguments, but that is not my style, and this is therefore not that kind of book. I began with a simple question: How did so many thousands of educated Scottish Christians become involved in slavery in Jamaica, and how did they justify their lifestyle to themselves and to others? What did Scottish newspapers, popular historians, philosophers and the public think at the time? Did they tell themselves that black lives didn’t matter because white people were superior to anyone with a darker skin?

To address this question, I needed first-hand accounts. I needed to go back to the beginning, when Scots first crossed the Atlantic and encountered Africans. I ended up doing a good deal more research than I had anticipated. The question I was trying to pin down was both more harrowing and complicated and the results ultimately more challenging than I had first expected. Fortunately, Scots in the 1700s were literate and opinionated. Our forebears, even in the 1700s, sent letters and instructions back and forth across the Atlantic Ocean. They wrote angrily to the newspapers and argued in Parliament about Jamaica. The place was important enough to Scotland to receive a lot of public attention.

The reason the resulting book is framed quite deliberately as a journey, a story with a beginning, middle and end, is because it is intended as exactly that. My narrative records the many reasons why people from Scotland crossed the Atlantic, the ambitions they had, where those ambitions took them and where that leaves us today. I try to tell it as far as possible through their eyes. In that sense, the story is written from a ‘white perspective’. The book ends with the end to slavery, but my research confirmed that the attitudes formed in the time of slavery have undoubtedly been passed down through many generations and remain with us in Scotland today.

The text is informed by wide reading of Black academic sources and writing by people who lived in bondage for much of their lives. For obvious reasons, precious few enslaved Jamaicans left behind written accounts of their lives in the 1700s, though remarkably some did. Wedderburn’s recollections of his white father’s predatory attitude toward the women he enslaved and his descriptions of his courageous, smuggler granny offer a rare window into their long ago lived experience.¹ Most slave writing, however, was published, and sometimes rather clumsily edited, by white Christians in the United States after slavery was abolished. Though these accounts are very helpful, their time frame and attitudes arose in a more settled society. Scots in the Caribbean Islands were predominantly male, itinerant visitors rather than settler families. Jamaica had few resident white women and tens of thousands of young, enslaved girls. The result was a society where sex between white men and black women and the sexual abuse of young black girls was widespread.

Letters home to Scotland recorded much about life on the island of Jamaica: recovery from debilitating tropical illnesses, gossip about Scottish neighbours, explanations of how to cook turtles sent as gifts and the delights of eating pineapples. They included details of the birth and health of many Jamaican grandchildren. Family members replied from small towns and landed estates across Scotland expressing hopes for the success of Jamaican enterprises and the safe return of their adventurers. Newly arrived young men wrote to reassure family that they had safely made it, were receiving help from fellow Scots, and hoped to find new positions on the island. Arrangements were made for their children – some white, but mostly children of colour – to be sent home to get a good Scottish education. Successful planters invited friends to visit and view their island lives and arranged regular visits home for themselves.

Some of the language I use to tell this story needs explanation. It was some years before ‘white’ and ‘black’ were widely understood categories. I therefore avoid them in the early chapters of the book. Planters used the word ‘negro’, a word I quote in the text when reporting their speech or views. As I have suggested, ‘white’ was a category given to Europeans of all classes for political reasons. It came later in the 1700s when the need to keep the enslaved in their place became more strident as some children of colour and skilled slaves were mixing freely in white society. I use the word ‘slave’ or ‘slavery’ when I am talking about that system, the institution and the campaigns against it. In doing so, I recognise how hard it is to find words which help us to escape de-humanising ideas and images of enslaved people. I want to rewind, wipe the images and rebuild for a number of reasons. The typical slave cutting and planting cane in the sugar fields was not a black-skinned man with whip marks on his back, though many thousands of such men existed, but a resilient, sexually abused, teenage girl. Enslaved girls thought of themselves as Africans by cultural heritage, and this is the word I mostly use to talk about them. Second and third generation slaves maybe thought of themselves as Jamaican Africans. Scots, by contrast, were ‘in Jamaica’ but never thought of or referred to themselves as ‘Jamaicans’.

In those years, the island had great prestige with which Scots were keen to be associated. Moreover, it was a place that was familiar to many, many Scottish people. When Scots left home for North America, they stayed there, but most of the tens of thousands of young men of all classes and trades who went to Jamaica came back to Scotland. They wrote home regularly. I spent hours in archives with their letters and carefully kept accounts, unwrapping their flimsy, yellowed papers, struggling with the curly flourishes of their script and imagining their journey across the Atlantic all those years ago. I studied the regular orders for nails, hoes, bed sheets, candles, butter and pearl barley. I read the writers’ thanks for the presents of pickles, cheese and sauces, safely arrived on the other side of the Atlantic. These letters introduced characters who spoke of bathing in the warm waters of the Caribbean and asking whether the barrel of sugar sent as a present for their grandmother had arrived yet.

Africans might arrive in Jamaica in a wretched state, but they also left homes, familiar foods and loved ones behind. They brought with them plenty of useful African know-how about surviving in a hot climate. Like rural people in Scotland at that time, they knew how to build their own homes and grow their own food. In addition, on arrival they were often trained to became expert masons, carpenters and distillers. In an effort to free the narrative from dominant images, I hesitate to call them ‘enslaved’ each time they are mentioned, even though they certainly were enslaved, but the word feels dehumanising. They were also struggling to be thinking, feeling, fully human beings. In an effort to restore some of that humanity, I prefer to simply call them ‘Africans’, ‘expert Africans’ or ‘field workers’. I call them ‘slaves’ when paraphrasing white thinking, reporting white perspectives and examining official views in order to emphasise that difference.

Scottish place names, smoked herrings in tins, oat porridge and folk with the surname ‘Campbell’ are obvious signs that Scottish people once lived in Jamaica. Porridge made with ale and sugar is a current staple in the Blue Mountains, a dish which was the centrepiece of Scottish harvest festivals in the 18th century. I had never thought of Scotland and Jamaica as quite so intimately connected. I was surprised to find that four of the six 18th century governors of Jamaica, those who were in charge when the sugar trade was at its height, were proud Scots. These governors received the second highest salary paid to any British colonial official. The post was one of huge influence. The Scots were active in all the Caribbean Islands; in many, they formed a higher proportion of the population than they did in Jamaica, but Jamaica, being the most prosperous, was of much greater importance to Scotland’s economy. At the time, it brought more profit to Britain than the much larger colonies of North America.

Shortly after I began my work on Scotland and Jamaica, I made a visit to the island. There I learned that not only Campbell but Thompson, Cameron, Grant and various Mcs and Macs are common Jamaican surnames. Several people I met claimed descent from Scots. I could see superficially that Scotland played a role in shaping modern Jamaica and that the island has undoubtedly influenced Scotland. Jamaicans love preserved fish, and Scots to this day have a sweet tooth. Without sugar from Jamaica, there would have been no Scottish shortbread, marmalade, tablet or boiled sweets. Enslaved Africans were fed from products which never grew in the West Indies and which today’s Jamaican residents still have a taste for. But tracking down the more fundamental ways in which the relationship shaped Scotland needed sustained work. Plantation books confirmed that feeding and clothing the enslaved population with barrels of herring, oats and linen cloth were good business opportunities on which many Scottish jobs depended. The cheap imported protein of those days has been passed down through several generations and lives on in modern taste buds. The slave diet of yesterday has become the soul food of today: salt or smoked fish with ackee in Jamaica and ham hock soup with greens in the American South.

Several of the rural shacks in which we slept on our visit to the island were obviously homemade. The plots on which they stood had been handed down from generation to generation on abandoned ‘capture land’ and settled by squatters. Like many Jamaicans, our hosts might roughly know the history of their homes, but had no documents to prove the little plot on which their home stood belonged to them. When sugar lost the protective taxes it had enjoyed for centuries and workers had to be paid, many European landowners simply walked away, still holding their proof of ownership of the land. The more recent tourist boom has created a potential for profit in the picturesque Blue Mountains, where runaways hid themselves long ago, and on the scraps of provision ground land along the seaside coast, where former slaves made free lives. Squatters are now being confronted by owners who want their land back.

My research uncovered that Jamaica gave Scotland so much more than sugar. Scottish doctors, working on slave ships and sugar estates, practiced the use of quinine for treating malaria and built expertise in tropical medicine. It was in Jamaica that doctors pioneered the widespread use of the live smallpox inoculation that eventually led to better survival rates for Scottish schoolchildren.² Scots learned and brought home commercial habits from sugar estates that were later applied to Scottish land management and industry. The profitable business which attracted many to the port of Kingston, the biggest slave trading centre in the Caribbean, was the buying and selling of slaves, which many Scots moved into. They hired hundreds of Scottish seamen and sea captains who risked their lives trading slaves and gained valuable ocean-going navigational expertise in the process. Little real money changed hands in Jamaica. The proceeds of enterprises there were paid into accounts in Glasgow, Ayr or Edinburgh that were used for all financial transactions, including funds to buy shoes and underclothes for mothers and sisters at home.

Estate accounts and ostentatious spending by elite Scots, family wills and eventual compensation for slaves were all testaments to the money made in Jamaica. Some families made enough to be catapulted into a global elite. Since so much has been written about planter families and their estates, I was surprised to find that Scottish traders and merchants were more numerous than planters in Jamaica. Scottish archives brought home to me how many small traders made a living by loading their boats with Scottish produce and crossing to Jamaica, returning with cargoes full of sugar, rum and sometimes cotton from America. This trading brought various degrees of wealth to most of Scotland’s coastal towns, such as Inveraray, Ayr, Wigtown, Kirkcudbright, Arbroath, Leith and Dumfries.

Merchant banks in Scotland held the steady flow of profit from the sale of sugar and rum. These banks arranged mortgages for major land and slave purchases to be paid off year by year from Scottish accounts. The most opulent of our merchant families risked their wealth in equipping ships with barter goods for the transatlantic slave trade, establishing trusted kin in each corner of the trade linking Scotland, West Africa and Kingston. They spread their risks by joining funding partnerships for boats venturing from the ports of Liverpool, London and Bristol. They developed comfortable rooms in which bartering took place, out of sight of the slave holding dungeons and cages on the West African coast. They set up the slave markets in Kingston, Jamaica and stabilised prices by taking bookings for slaves, which were underwritten by guaranteed loans for purchase. They helped to make Kingston the most important hub of the trade, from which the enslaved were transported to America and other Caribbean islands. Scottish families over several generations played a substantial and lucrative role in trafficking the more than six million Africans who were sold into a life of plantation slavery. In the process, they helped to develop the legal and financial pillars of the British Empire and the resulting modern international capitalism. The risks of poor harvests and possible loss of valuable cargoes crossing the Atlantic were protected by a rapidly developing insurance business. Scotland’s leading role in banking and insurance therefore owed much to the buying, transportation and sale of enslaved Africans. Vigilance in keeping slaves chained down and locked up on board ships kept insurance risks as low as possible. On the plantations, vigilance and a strong record in extracting hard work and preventing escapes helped bankers to assess risk when granting mortgages.

These are just some of the many reasons why not every Jamaican wants to simply forgive the wrongs done to their people. Exactly how much of Scotland’s wealth originated from the sugar and slave trade and all of its associated industries is a matter of debate. It cannot be denied that profits made in Jamaica were transferred to Scotland. This nation therefore bears a significant share of responsibility for the enslavement of Africans, the harm done to the Black population over more than 100 years and Jamaica’s post-slavery poverty. There are groups in Jamaica today who say that Scots oppressed them, bled their country dry, got their money out if they could and returned home. If Scotland gets its independence, these Jamaicans want to put a financial figure on that harm and send the bill for reparations.

During the 1700s and 1800s, the columns of our Scottish newspapers took up Jamaican causes and reported the arrival or non-arrival of Jamaican boats in our ports. There were regular reunions in Glasgow where successful ex-Jamaican adventurers drank to their achievements. They fondly recalled their adventures in the sun and toasted continued prosperity to the island that had transformed their lives. So proud were they of the Jamaican connection that they named their Jamaican estates after their Scottish homes and Glasgow’s streets after people and places in Jamaica. Those who came home with wealth changed the look of our countryside. They refashioned the land they bought and homes they built in Scotland to look much like the grand plantations they left behind.

For many years, itinerant Scotsmen were preferred as overseers, bookkeepers and managers, experts in cracking the whip over the naked backs of the women and men who laboured on the plantations. At the same time, Scots in Jamaica enjoyed sex, both consensual and abusive, with enslaved women, leaving behind or bringing home a great number of illegitimate children of colour. Initially, the children born to white men with black partners scandalised their Scottish families, not because they were black, but because they were rather obviously illegitimate. Many Jamaicans have Scottish names. Their claim to being descended from Scots is easier to establish than the authenticity of a surname, as many Jamaicans researching their roots have found. For over 100 years, there was a large, itinerant population of young Scottish men living on the island of Jamaica. Best estimates calculate this population never dipped much below 20,000, but in the late 1700s and early 1800s could have been much higher. They accounted for about a third or perhaps half of Jamaica’s white residents. Many only stayed for five to ten years, but new adventurers were found to cross the Atlantic and replace them throughout the whole of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Graves in churchyards in Kirkcudbrightshire record 100 or more such adventurers who died in Jamaica but whose families had taken the trouble to chisel their names on the family headstone.

Diaries, letters and local records of births and wills, as well as Jamaican legislation to control ‘mixed-race’ offspring, allow us to estimate the resulting progeny of these young men. Scots were probably responsible for a third to a half of the vast numbers of those identified as ‘mixed-race’ children who were born to enslaved mothers in Jamaica over the years when large numbers of Scots lived there – 30,000 of over 100,000 children would be a rather conservative figure. The British Government required that a census of residents, including enslaved residents, be made from time to time. A figure for these official ‘mixed-race’ and ‘free coloured’ individuals is available for some localities. This figure would include only those children whose fathers had the cash to manumit/free them and all those children born into settled enough partnerships for their fathers to register themselves as the white parent. Thomas Thistlewood, one of the diarists used in my story, did this with only one of his several children, his son John.

Children in the census were a small subset of the children born of ‘black–white’ liaisons over the century. Many of the children of fleeting, coerced or paid sexual encounters, and all of those born to cash-strapped bookkeepers and trades-people, would not necessarily be included here. These children would grow up enslaved and working in the fields. Their claim to Scots parentage gave them no rights, and a specific parent could not be easily verified. Few children of colour were legitimate, as only free mothers could marry a child’s father. Children born to enslaved mothers were owned by whoever owned their mother. Their lighter skin could cause them problems. ‘Brown’ children were thought to be less capable of hard work, less biddable and therefore troublesome ‘field slaves’. Knowing this, and the brutal life in the sugar field, fathers, if they cared at all and had money, found them jobs in or around the great house or paid for an apprenticeship where they might learn a skill. These enslaved children of colour, who were the great majority of those of mixed parentage, had no surnames. They might have known who their father was, they might have used his name, but they did not bear his name legally. Wills of planters show that those children who did have a surname were rarely given their Scottish father’s name. In the African community in Jamaica, family life was rarely stable. The bonds of fatherhood were casually broken by the sale and movement of the enslaved or by white men leaving for home, shifting between estates to find better paid work and having great numbers of female partners. Yet African tradition places great importance on lineage, on belonging to a particular man’s household. Mothers no doubt told children who their fathers were, but proving paternity would be quite another matter. Christian converts chose a surname; most did not choose the name of their owner, for obvious reasons, even if someone from the estate where they lived was their parent.

To defend their fortunes, Scots helped to build and spread the idea that their ‘white race’ was morally, intellectually and culturally superior to the ‘black race’ they controlled. Scottish Members of Parliament, sections of the Scottish Press and many others vigorously and publicly defended this opinion long after slavery was abolished. We have a lot less evidence to help us understand how captured Africans made sense of their lives, how they survived over several generations and did so with more sanity and humanity intact than anyone might imagine. Africans exploited every chink in the planters’ armour to hold on to dignity and ingenuity amongst much sadness and degradation. They used what little free time they had to carve out a landed peasant lifestyle, using the plots allotted to them to grow their own food, which gave them cash from sales and helped to shape their Jamaican future. Planters feared and would have loved to curtail these developments, but they dared not disturb the enslaved population’s food-growing because they feared revolt, the possibility of which was always present. In the end, Black resistance and the legitimate demand for the rights denied to them, along with the unlawful white response, did eventually bring the system to its knees.

Our close liaison with Jamaica helped to make many Scots wealthy. Jamaican