Jamaica Ladies: Female Slaveholders and the Creation of Britain's Atlantic Empire

By Christine Walker

Jamaica Ladies is the first systematic study of the free and freed women of European, Euro-African, and African descent who perpetuated chattel slavery and reaped its profits in the British Empire. Their actions helped transform Jamaica into the wealthiest slaveholding colony in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Starting in the 1670s, a surprisingly large and diverse group of women helped secure English control of Jamaica and, crucially, aided its developing and expanding slave labor regime by acquiring enslaved men, women, and children to protect their own tenuous claims to status and independence.

Female colonists employed slaveholding as a means of advancing themselves socially and financially on the island. By owning others, they wielded forms of legal, social, economic, and cultural authority not available to them in Britain. In addition, slaveholding allowed free women of African descent, who were not far removed from slavery themselves, to cultivate, perform, and cement their free status. Alongside their male counterparts, women bought, sold, stole, and punished the people they claimed as property and vociferously defended their rights to do so. As slavery's beneficiaries, these women worked to stabilize and propel this brutal labor regime from its inception.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
• Release date: Apr 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9781469655277

Christine Walker

Christine Walker is assistant professor of history at Yale-NUS College in Singapore.

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Introduction

When Elizabeth Keyhorne sat down to write her last will and testament in 1713, she might have been distracted by the din of hammering and sawing and the shouts of dockworkers outside. Located on West Street, Keyhorne’s house was on the fringes of the rapidly growing port town of Kingston, just a few blocks from the waterfront that lined one of the deepest harbors in the world (Plate 1). She lived amid a flurry of construction and maritime activity. An ever-increasing number of ships sailed to Jamaica each year. They carried an amalgam of goods acquired from every corner of the globe. Gloves, stockings, and sewing needles arrived alongside packages of pepper, cinnamon, and printed calicoes. Although expanding trade increased the variety of items that were available to locals like Keyhorne, most of the merchandise was earmarked to be sold illegally as contraband to Spanish customers who paid high prices for illicit goods. Keyhorne would have also been familiar with the sights and sounds that emanated from another type of vessel—one that carried human cargo in the form of African captives to Kingston’s shores. After spending a few months of seasoning in the pens that lined the harbor, most of the enslaved people who had survived the Middle Passage would be forced back onto ships and carried along with the manufactured imports to customers in New Spain.¹

PLATE 1. Location of Elizabeth Keyhorne’s property. Detail from [Plan of Kingston], by Michael Hay. [1745?]. Courtesy, Library of Congress, Geography and Maps Division, G4964.K5646 1745 .H3

Elizabeth Keyhorne’s property was located on West Street, which still exists in Kingston. The harbor, which is depicted as swarming with ships, was a short walk down the street. When Keyhorne made her will in 1713, the harbor would have been less crowded but still busy. The map was engraved by Michael Hay, a local engraver.

In the early eighteenth century, Kingston was poised to become the largest transshipment depot for enslaved Africans in the Atlantic world. Keyhorne exploited this situation to acquire her own slaves. At the end of her life, Keyhorne possessed two enslaved women, Jenny and Daphne, and their two daughters. The widow bequeathed all of them to her son, Joseph, who was apprenticed to a joiner to learn detailed carpentry skills. Joseph’s training ensured him a profitable career as a craftsman in a town that was undergoing a construction boom. When his mother died, Joseph would assume ownership of the captive women and children, who would either act as his domestic servants or be sold to fund his career. As she faced her own demise, Keyhorne might have taken comfort in her ability to contribute these people—who embodied both labor and material wealth—toward Joseph’s promising future.²

During her lifetime, Keyhorne had married, raised a son, and acquired real estate in Kingston, achieving middling respectability and financial security for her family. Becoming a slaveholder signified one of her most important accomplishments. In the context of eighteenth-century Jamaica, these features of Keyhorne’s life marked her as ordinary, rather than unusual. The island, and Kingston in particular, was home to a large number of legally independent female colonists, and slaveholding enabled women like Keyhorne to achieve a level of affluence that few other colonists in British America could hope to attain. A more careful reading of Keyhorne’s will, however, suggests that her life—and her relationship to slavery—was far more complicated than it initially appears. Joseph, it turns out, was not Keyhorne’s only child. The mother also made bequests to my four daughters … now being slaves. When she left instructions for disbursing her estate in 1713, Keyhorne’s other children, Molly, Margaritta, Flora, and Franky, were being held in bondage. Keyhorne gave the girls her linen, woolen, and silk clothing—the kinds of intimate personal items that women commonly offered to their daughters—but her will did not include plans for obtaining their freedom. Perhaps Keyhorne lacked the funds to purchase their manumissions. Or maybe the man who owned her children refused to release them from captivity. It is also possible that Keyhorne and her son agreed that he would sell Jenny, Daphne, and their daughters and use the proceeds to purchase his own siblings. In a colony where people served as currency, such transactions were commonplace.³

Whatever the case, Keyhorne’s reference to Molly, Margaritta, Flora, and Franky, now being slaves, dramatically alters our interpretation of the woman’s life. Though Keyhorne identified herself by her marital status as a widow, not her race, the presence of her enslaved daughters hints at a very different trajectory from the one that the rest of her will constructs. Her connection to the captive girls and the early date of her will suggest that Keyhorne was born in Africa and then transported along with an ever-growing number of captives to the Caribbean. Once there, Keyhorne gave birth to four daughters, whose father was likely enslaved. The free status and expensive apprenticeship held by her son, Joseph, on the other hand, point toward a free father. His mother’s relationship with this man probably initiated her own remarkable transformation from slavery to freedom, marriage, and her adoption of the name Elizabeth Keyhorne. At the end of her life, Keyhorne resided just a few blocks from the shore where she might have disembarked from a slave ship years earlier.

A few brief sentences in Keyhorne’s 1713 will unravel long-held assumptions about the interplay of gender, race, marital status, legal status, and kinship ties in the Anglo-Atlantic world. This document illuminates a pivotal moment in the history of the British Empire. It tells the story of a person’s traumatic dislocation and relocation across the Atlantic and of her transition from subjectification to subjecthood. As a slave who became an enslaver herself, Keyhorne challenges a historical account that casts the typical slaveholder as a white male. If Keyhorne’s actions appear contradictory to us, they made perfect sense in the context of the early modern Atlantic world. Her life describes slavery as an invasive social practice, one that demanded the participation of every free and freed person, including those of African and Euro-African descent, to extract a profit and ensure colonial stability. Keyhorne was not a marginalized outlier who operated on the periphery of the empire. On the contrary, from Brazil to Saint Domingue, free and freed women acquired slaves to protect their own tenuous claims to status and independence. Slaveholding was a vector for social mobility and financial success, and Keyhorne lived in Kingston, Jamaica, at the very moment when it was becoming a crucial node in the thickening web of the Atlantic slave trade. Her life was indelibly stamped by colonialism and slavery, which she both experienced and participated in.⁴

Focusing on Keyhorne and the other free and freed women who migrated to Jamaica, either by choice or by force, reconfigures our understanding of how the island became the wealthiest colony with the largest enslaved population in the Anglo-Atlantic world. If male merchants and sailors oversaw the purchase and transportation of captive Africans to America, then free and freed women acted as the handmaidens of empire, weaving these captives into the warp and weft of colonial societies. During an era when social, familial, and professional connections were intertwined, their actions were instrumental. Jamaica’s notoriously deadly mortality rates, its mercantile focus, and its involvement in imperial warfare made free families even more reliant on female members to secure local estates, to fill crucial niches in urban markets, to manage plantations, and to facilitate overseas trade. Most importantly, the investment made by female colonists in unfree labor ensured the commitment not just of individual men but also of entire families to a slave labor regime that, in turn, drove the growth of Britain’s commercial empire during the eighteenth century.

Jamaica Ladies is the first comprehensive and multidimensional account of the contributions made by free and freed women of European, Euro-African, and African descent to these fundamental historical developments in the Atlantic world.⁵ The book questions long-standing beliefs about who perpetuated chattel slavery and reaped the profits of settler colonialism during the early modern era, arguing that female colonists played crucial roles in constructing a society that depended on enslaved labor. Drawing on thousands of largely unstudied manuscript records, including wills, parish registers, court cases, probated inventories, and personal letters, Jamaica Ladies reshapes a historical narrative that either emphasizes women’s absence or characterizes their disempowerment in Atlantic slave societies.⁶ The British Caribbean, in particular, has been portrayed as a hypermasculine space—one that was dominated by male pirates, merchants, and planters.⁷ Feminist scholars who study the region have focused on enslaved women, revealing how slaveholders co-opted the productive and reproductive capacities of female captives and subjected them to sexual exploitation. However, their research still configures the normative slaveholder as a white male. Consequently, women’s activities in the region as colonizers and as slaveholders—and the gendered implications of their pursuits—remain largely unexamined and undertheorized.⁸ Scholarship on the intersection of race, gender, and sexuality in British North America offers a more robust point of departure for Jamaica Ladies. Collectively, this literature identifies the emergence of punitive laws that targeted white women’s sexuality and banned interracial relationships and marriage. Kathleen Brown, Clare Lyons, and Kirsten Fischer, for instance, contend that white women were subjected to stricter legal and social regimes during the eighteenth century. My book also explores the degree to which early modern beliefs about gender and, gradually, racial differences were naturalized, embedded in legal, political, economic, and religious systems, and mapped onto bodies, but it draws different conclusions about how these dynamics played out in the colonial context.⁹

This study is not a chronicle of free women’s disempowerment and oppression. Nor does it celebrate female agency. Instead, it offers a far more ambivalent account of the gendered dimensions of power. Recognizing women as powerful agents of slavery and colonialism calls into question the extent to which normative European gender ideologies were imported and adopted across the Atlantic. Female slaveholders wielded novel and significant legal, social, economic, and cultural authority, which they enacted inside and outside the household. The title Jamaica Ladies draws attention to this divergence between metropolitan ideals and colonial practice. In Britain, lady conveyed multiple meanings. It was an honorific title that signified a woman’s membership in the aristocracy, a term that recognized her refined and genteel qualities, and a label for the female head of a household who commanded servants. In sum, lady signified feminine respectability and rank.¹⁰

The attributes that defined femininity, of course, were not static. At the end of the seventeenth century, women were conceived of as inherently lustful and prone to sin. Marriage was viewed as a necessary means of containing female sexuality and ensuring a woman’s sexual virtue, which underwrote her honor. Although the woman was believed to be an inferior version of the ideal male type, the sexes were not defined as binary opposites; rather, male and female existed on a continuum. During the eighteenth century, however, a two-sex model gained popularity, whereby men and women were viewed as inherently distinctive, and femininity was correlated with passivity, delicacy, and domesticity.¹¹

From the British perspective, Jamaica’s female colonists did not manifest the attributes that were correlated with newer gender ideologies. Portrayed as lustful, sexually capacious, passionate, and ungovernable, they were certainly not ladies according to metropolitan standards. Rather, they seemed to invoke the older notions of passionate and unruly womanhood. When the English minister James White traveled to the island in the 1720s, for instance, he accused a local judge of living as a married person w[i]th his Brothers wife. Instead of ostracizing the woman for adultery, White claimed, all society seemed to happily socialize with the incestuous wife as if she was a virtuous woman. According to White, a woman could maintain her status as a lady in spite of her transgressive sexual behavior on the island. In their role as slaveholders, female colonists further upset British gender ideals. By commanding absolute authority over enslaved dependents, they claimed masculine prerogatives for themselves and rejected their position as submissive dependents.¹²

Early in the eighteenth century, observers like White associated the Caribbean—and the women who lived there—with sexual and social disorder. Although the texts authored by British men tell us little about colonists’ lived experiences, they do point toward a society that adopted a notably lenient approach toward female sexuality. A combination of local conditions, especially the omnipresence of slavery, persistently high mortality rates, and an intensively commercial environment, altered gender norms in Jamaica. The colonial government, which was focused on surveilling and controlling a skyrocketing enslaved population, ignored the sexual activities of free people. In turn, a large number of colonists started families outside wedlock, and illegitimacy rates were strikingly high. By the 1750s, Jamaica was a place where a woman like Teresia Constantia Phillips, who was viewed as a notorious profligate in Britain after publishing memoirs of her sexual escapades, received a warm welcome. Indeed, Phillips was made the Mistress of Revels, the first official political post ever offered to a woman in the colony. As the example of Phillips shows, islanders did not necessarily equate femininity or being a lady with sexual virtue. A free woman’s social status, instead, emanated from the complex interplay of a variety of characteristics, including her legal status as a free person, her ability to enslave others, her marital status, her kinship ties, her wealth, her education, and her religion, all of which aided in the construction of her position.¹³

In a labor regime where enslaved status was only mapped onto nonwhite bodies, race also influenced the lives of female colonists in significant ways. When Keyhorne wrote her will in 1713, colonial assemblies throughout the Anglo-Atlantic world were developing racialized legal distinctions between servants and slaves. Jamaica followed this trend. Borrowing, in part, from Barbadian laws, Jamaica’s legislature, for example, required masters and mistresses to obtain legal permission to physically punish servants, but not slaves. Similarly, men were supposed to compensate employers for impregnating female servants, but the assembly passed no acts to regulate enslaved women’s reproductive capacities. Such laws confirmed the correlation of whiteness with legal, economic, cultural, and sexual privilege in relation to nonwhite people and equated enslaved status with African descent.¹⁴

In this context, women like Keyhorne who were not far removed from slavery themselves needed to be especially vigilant about cultivating and performing free status in ways that white women did not. However, Keyhorne’s life also reflects a certain plasticity in local perceptions of race. She lived in an era when Europeans believed that environmental and cultural conditions determined skin color and therefore considered race to be a mutable characteristic, rather than an inherent facet of a person’s identity. Though local administrators used terms like white, negro, and mulatto to describe Jamaica’s free populace, efforts to establish a legible racial hierarchy and racially segregate people were haphazard. Indeed, in the face of devastating mortality rates, the colonial government occasionally recognized and, to an extent, legitimized the proliferation of interracial relationships in hopes of bolstering the free population.¹⁵

The actions of Keyhorne and other free and freed people who maintained ambiguous racial identities challenged institutional attempts to demarcate boundaries along racial lines. In practice, the intimate connections forged between colonists of European, African, and Euro-African descent fortified the island. Together they transformed a sparsely populated Spanish outpost into a profit-generating engine for the empire. Islanders accomplished this metamorphosis by establishing more expansive, flexible, and inclusive families. In the early modern era, the family included blood relatives, kin through marriage, servants, and, in the colonial context, slaves, who shared the same household. Free and freed people in Jamaica enlarged their kin groups to include illegitimate, freed, and sometimes enslaved relatives. In doing so, colonists who were positioned in the crosshairs of a world characterized by demographic and economic volatility managed to survive and prosper. Epidemiological crises, natural disasters, and imperial warfare did not result in a failed settler society, as we might expect. Instead, islanders developed remarkably durable kinship networks that became the lynchpin for Britain’s ongoing control of Jamaica, and women played fundamental roles in this process.¹⁶

Jamaica Ladies crafts a granular portrait of colonial society that shows how the first few generations of families, rather than individual men acting in isolation, secured the island for the empire. Starting in the 1670s and ending in the 1760s, it focuses on a critical yet poorly understood period of colonial expansion that saw Atlantic trade, contrabanding, privateering, planting, and especially slavery transform Jamaica. Typically, scholars either investigate seventeenth-century Port Royal or they focus on the late eighteenth century, when the sugar plantation economy was already well established. Yet, in the years between these two bookends, the island gained its ascendency. By the 1730s, no other colony could rival Jamaica’s economic and strategic importance or compete with the financial and political power wielded by its constituents in London. All of these factors make Jamaica more representative of early America, as Vincent Brown has argued, than other regions such as New England and the Chesapeake, which have received the majority of the attention from historians of British America.¹⁷

England’s initial foray in Jamaica, however, did not lead to high expectations about the island’s potential. After a disastrous attempt to seize Hispaniola from Spain as part of Oliver Cromwell’s Western Design, a motley crew of half-starved English soldiers and colonial recruits made a last-minute decision to take the sparsely populated island of Jamaica. Though their numbers were small, English women were involved in efforts to colonize Jamaica from the start. Some, like the wife of General Robert Venables, likely joined their husbands on the military expedition to the Caribbean. When they landed on the island in 1655, this group encountered a small contingent of Spanish and Afro-Spanish colonists, who, together with their slaves, had subsisted as ranchers, rearing and selling cattle to the treasure-laden flotillas traveling through the Caribbean on their way to Spain, for more than 150 years. During the 1660s, the English fought a guerilla war with these resilient Spanish inhabitants while struggling to survive on the island.¹⁸

A few decades later, English settlers had established themselves on the south coast, where they built a military outpost and port. Initially called Cagway and then renamed Port Royal after the Restoration of Charles II, the town was flourishing by the 1670s. Port Royal became one of the wealthiest and busiest towns in the Anglo-Atlantic world, supporting a thriving trade in licit and illicit goods—one that women actively participated in. After a devastating earthquake destroyed much of Port Royal in 1692, male and female colonists began relocating to the new port town of Kingston, where they continued to prosper from a range of legal and illegal maritime activities. When Britain acquired the valuable asiento from Spain in 1713, making it the chief contractor of enslaved Africans in the Atlantic world, Kingston’s role in the empire grew exponentially. Ideally located near Spanish territories in America, Kingston became the primary transshipment entrepôt for the British slave trade, ushering in a torrent of human captives, money, ships, goods, and visitors to the island.¹⁹

The investment made by Keyhorne and other early settlers in slaveholding made Jamaica a prison for the most substantial unfree African population in British America. The island’s enslaved population swelled from 9,504 in 1673 to 74,525 in 1730. (In comparison, 50,000 enslaved people inhabited Virginia, and 21,000 captives lived in South Carolina in the 1730s.) The Royal African Company transported 18,801 enslaved Africans to Jamaica between 1680 and 1693; the island received another 44,376 from the company and private traders between 1698 and 1707. By 1752, 110,000 enslaved people inhabited Jamaica—the majority of whom were born in Africa, coming from the Bight of Biafra, the Gold Coast, West Central Africa, Sierra Leone, the Bight of Benin, and Senegambia. To maintain control of this African slave majority, Jamaica established a brutal labor regime and harsh slave codes that provoked frequent insurgencies. Enslaved people who fled from their owners joined the Maroons—free descendants of slaves who had been transported by the Spanish—aiding them in a war of attrition against settlers. After decades of failed attempts to defeat the Maroons, the British army acknowledged defeat and signed a treaty with them in 1739.²⁰

These violent conditions did not rend the social fabric of free society. Instead, local men and women adapted to—and even flourished in—the precarious world they were forming. Free families were able to survive and succeed by enhancing the roles played by female kin in relation to inheritance, commerce, marriage, and slaveholding. For instance, they established inheritance strategies that divided estates more equitably and took measures to protect married women’s property, a large portion of which was composed of slaves. By strengthening the property rights of individuals irrespective of gender, the colonial government supported and encouraged local adaptations. Altogether, colonists devised flexible and practical customs that were designed to navigate both Caribbean and Atlantic conditions. In doing so, they developed a form of colonialism that was secular, legalistic, and aggressively profit-oriented, yet also intensively family-focused and deeply reliant on female members.²¹

Free and freed women, in turn, benefited from their elevated positions within colonial society. Working as merchants, shopkeepers, seamstresses, and tavernkeepers, female islanders of European, African, and Euro-African descent helped to suture together local, Atlantic, and global markets.²² Although sugar planting became ever more important to the Jamaican economy, the island never became a sugar monoculture like Britain’s other Caribbean colonies, thus creating opportunities for women to engage in a variety of agricultural and ranching ventures. Of course, the holdings of female colonists paled in comparison with the gargantuan fortunes amassed by elite male planters and merchants.²³ Still, free and freed women in Jamaica were significantly richer than most Britons. The average female colonist owned a median estate valued at £285 and a mean estate worth £803 (between £41,500 to £116,900, respectively, today).²⁴ Her wealth far surpassed the modest £42 estate possessed by an ordinary person living in Britain or in mainland North America. Female property holders on the higher end of the scale also equaled their male peers in the West Indies, whose fortunes, amounting to £1,042, made them the wealthiest people in the British Empire.²⁵ For most Britons, this level of wealth was unattainable; for lower-status women like London’s female servants and housekeepers, who survived on £2 to £15 per annum, it was unimaginable.²⁶

Access to African captives significantly amplified the wealth of Jamaica’s free women. Nearly every female venture, from the small provisioning plot to the large mercantile operation, relied on enslaved laborers to function. As a group, female colonists made a considerable investment in slavery. Between the end of the seventeenth and the mid-eighteenth century, one of every ten slaveowners on the island was a woman, and an estimated 80 percent of all female property holders owned slaves. Female slaveholding patterns throughout British America require further investigation, but it is reasonable to assume that, given Jamaica’s primacy in the Atlantic slave trade and the scale of its enslaved population, the free women who settled there reaped the greatest material benefits from slavery.²⁷

In addition to economic gains, female colonists derived significant legal and social advantages from slaveholding. Just as local lawmakers sharpened the racial differences between servants and the enslaved, they also blunted the gendered distinctions between male and female slaveholders. Enslavers of both sexes wielded nearly unlimited juridical power over African captives. Although women throughout the Anglo-Atlantic world were expected to manage servants in their capacity as household heads, they exercised a dominion of an entirely different magnitude over slaves. Their command far exceeded the bounds of the domestic realm—the hearthstone of female authority. In sum, slaveholding counteracted the legal, material, and social disabilities and disadvantages that early modern women were typically subjected to. Yet it did not turn Jamaica into an egalitarian utopia for female colonists. Men still controlled the lion’s share of the money, land, slaves, and political power on the island. Moreover, women had no formal political rights and rarely held public office—nor did they anywhere else in the empire. The data collected from a survey of all 10,222 estates that were probated between 1674 and 1784 indicates that, although women held 12 percent of the estates, their holdings made up only 5 percent of the total value of the estates. The mean value is skewed, however, as it includes the outliers. The £360 median value of a colonist’s estate is closer to the £285 median value of an ordinary woman’s holdings.²⁸

The material and social disparities between male and female colonists created distinctive forms of slaveholding wherein women enslavers who possessed fewer resources relied more intensively on individual captives for their labor and their monetary value as property. Women who operated taverns, shops, or small plantations, for instance, were more likely to work and live alongside the people whom they held in bondage than the male planters who controlled hundreds of slaves. Jamaica Ladies explores how the gendered dimensions of female slaveholding—its small-scale and intimate nature—shaped the lives of enslaved people in ways that are not well understood. Dependency and physical proximity personalized the relationships between women enslavers and enslaved people. Daily contact created ample opportunities for coercion and abuse. Indeed, captives who were held by female owners might have struggled to maintain their anonymity and distance more than those who labored on large plantations.²⁹

Despite the dramatic power differentials between enslavers and the enslaved, slavery was still a negotiated relationship that was influenced by captives themselves. As studies of baptism and manumission acts in later chapters of the book show, women treated slavery as a form of wealth building in people—thereby betraying the African influence on colonial practices of bondage. Enslaved people who navigated potentially treacherous relationships with their owners could pry concessions from them. Intimate connections might yield better living conditions, greater independence, powerful patrons, and sometimes even freedom. Although such actions may not reflect conventional examples of slave resistance, they still offer evidence of the ways in which the most marginalized members of colonial society sought to determine their own lives.³⁰

Atlantic slavery was never the sole concern of white men acting in isolation, nor were slave-based societies like Jamaica inhospitable and restrictive places for free women. On the contrary, as Jamaica Ladies demonstrates, colonial conditions created distinctive opportunities, especially in the form of slaveholding, for women who, in turn, commanded more affluence and authority than their counterparts living elsewhere in the empire. Of course, male colonists reaped even larger benefits from their positions in the Caribbean. But colonial advantages mattered more to female inhabitants, whose lives were otherwise legally, economically, and socially restricted in relation to men. In Jamaica, possessing other people who were both legal dependents and property significantly increased female sovereignty and financial independence. Slavery, therefore, provided women with an alternative to relying on men or marriage for support. In doing so, it altered the gendered and sexual relations between free people.

Attending to the varied lives of free and freed women, and revealing the advantages they gained from chattel slavery, challenges our fundamental understanding of how slave societies were constituted throughout the Atlantic world. When we shift our focus to female colonists, it becomes difficult to see how a remote and largely uninhabited island could have become the richest and the largest slaveholding colony in the British Empire without their involvement. Free and freed women participated in local and global markets, managed plantations, and directed the transmission of property from one generation to the next. Local actions had global consequences. Securing Jamaica—the fledgling empire’s most lucrative possession—required the contribution of free and freed women in building a slave society.

Surviving, let alone succeeding, in Jamaica demanded nerve, adaptability, and ruthless pragmatism. Free and freed women exhibited all of these qualities, proving themselves to be every bit as calculating and brutal as the men with whom they shared the island. As critical members of a free minority, female enslavers engaged in the daily practices of management, negotiation, and violence that sustained slaveholder power in Jamaica and devised a range of tactics to ensure the compliance of their captives. Women bought, sold, stole, and punished enslaved people and vociferously defended their rights to captives as property. Moreover, in their roles as wives, mothers, sisters, and aunts, women naturalized slaveholding practices within free families, ensuring the commitment of future generations of islanders to chattel slavery. By turning settler colonialism and slavery into opportunity, the first three generations of Jamaica’s ladies charted the trajectory for an island that increasingly steered the course of the British Empire.

NOTES

1. See, for example, Gregory E. O’Malley, Final Passages: The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 (Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill, N.C., 2014); Vincent Brown, The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (Cambridge, Mass., 2008); Colin Palmer, Human Cargoes: The British Slave Trade to Spanish America, 1700–1739 (Urbana, Ill., 1981).

2. Will of Elizabeth Keyhorne, 1713, Jamaica Wills, 1661–1771, XIV, Island Record Office (IRO), Spanish Town, Jamaica. Kathleen Wilson refers to Michael Hay, the engraver of the map of Kingston (Plate 1), in The Island Race: Englishness, Empire, and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (Milton, U.K., 2003), 160.

3. Will of Elizabeth Keyhorne, 1713, Jamaica Wills, XIV.

4. Freed people of African descent and even slaves acted as slaveholders throughout the Atlantic world. See, for instance, James H. Sweet, Domingos Álvares, African Healing, and the Intellectual History of the Atlantic World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2013); Dominique Rogers and Stewart King, Housekeepers, Merchants, Rentières: Free Women of Color in the Port Cities of Colonial Saint-Domingue, 1750–1790, in Douglas Catterall and Jodi Campbell, eds., Women in Port: Gendering Communities, Economies, and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500–1800 (Leiden, Neth., 2012), 369; Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Women and Slavery, I, Africa, the Indian Ocean World, and the Medieval North Atlantic (Athens, Ohio, 2007); Stewart R. King, Blue Coat or Powdered Wig: Free People of Color in Pre-Revolutionary Saint Domingue (Athens, Ga., 2001); Yesenia Barragan, Gendering Mastery: Female Slaveholders in the Columbian Pacific Lowlands, Slavery and Abolition, XXXIX (2018), 1–26; Wendy Wilson-Fall, Women Merchants and Slave Depots: Saint-Louis, Senegal, and St. Mary’s, Madagascar, in Ana Lucia Araujo, ed., Paths of the Atlantic Slave Trade: Interactions, Identities, and Images (Amherst, N.Y., 2011), 273–303.

5. Although work has been done on female slaveholding during the early modern period in the Atlantic world, Jamaica Ladies is the first book to systematically scrutinize multiple dimensions of women’s involvement in chattel slavery in Jamaica. An edited edition of Lucille Mathurin Mair’s 1970s dissertation is the only comparable study of the activities of female colonists on the island (Mathurin Mair, A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica, 1655–1844, ed. Hilary McD. Beckles and Verene A. Shepherd [Kingston, 2006]). More recent research by Cecily Jones shows that free women of European descent actively participated in the construction of whiteness as slaveholders in Barbados and South Carolina (Jones, Engendering Whiteness: White Women and Colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627–1865 [Manchester, U.K., 2007]). Kit Candlin and Cassandra Pybus, in Enterprising Women: Gender, Race, and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic (Athens, Ga., 2015), offer a study of free women of color in the British Caribbean, but female slaveholding is not the focus of their work. Although Marie Jenkins Schwartz has written about the involvement of the wives of the founding fathers in slavery, she studies a small group of elite women (Schwartz, Ties That Bound: Founding First Ladies and Slaves [Chicago, 2017]). Marisa J. Fuentes’s work includes a section on white women slaveowners; see Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia, 2016), chap. 3. See also Hilary McD. Beckles, Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society (Kingston, 1999), part 2.

The following articles reference female slaveholding in British America: Sarah E. Yeh, ‘A Sink of All Filthiness’: Gender, Family, and Identity in the British Atlantic, 1688–1763, Historian, LXVIII (2006), 79–82; Inge Dornan, Masterful Woman: Colonial Women Slaveholders in the Urban Low Country, Journal of American Studies, XXXIX (2005), 383–402; Linda L. Sturtz, The ‘Dimduke’ and the Duchess of Chandos: Gender and Power in Jamaican Plantation Management—A Case Study; or, A Different Story of ‘A Man [and His Wife] from a Place Called Hope,’ Revista / Review Interamericana, XXIX (1999), [1–15]; Cara Anzilotti, Autonomy and the Female Planter in Colonial South Carolina, Journal of Southern History, LXIII (1997), 239–268; Barbara Bush, White ‘Ladies,’ Coloured ‘Favourites,’ and Black ‘Wenches’: Some Considerations on Sex, Race, and Class Factors in Social Relations in White Creole Society in the British Caribbean, Slavery and Abolition, II, no. 3 (December 1981), 245–262. For comparative work on women slaveholders living in non-British regions of the Atlantic world, see Jennifer L. Palmer, Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic (Philadelphia, 2016); Pernille Ipsen, Daughters of the Trade: Atlantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast (Philadelphia, 2015); Barragan, Gendering Mastery, Slavery and Abolition, XXXIX (2018), 1–26; Danielle Terrazas Williams, ‘My Conscience Is Free and Clear’: African-Descended Women, Status, and Slave Owning in Mid-Colonial Mexico, Americas, LXXV (2018), 525–554.

Although focusing on the seventeenth and eighteenth century reveals much earlier precedents for women’s actions a century later, more work has been done on female slaveholders in antebellum America. See, for example, Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge, 2008); Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (New Haven, Conn., 2019); Kirsten E. Wood, Masterful Women: Slaveholding Widows from the American Revolution through the Civil War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004); Marli F. Weiner, Mistresses and Slaves: Plantation Women in South Carolina, 1830–80 (Chicago, 1998); Drew Gilpin Faust, ‘Trying to Do a Man’s Business’: Slavery, Violence, and Gender in the American Civil War, Gender and History, IV (1992), 197–214; Catherine Clinton, The Plantation Mistress: Woman’s World in the Old South (New York, 1982); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1988); Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York, 1984).

6. This book draws on records culled from archives in Jamaica, Britain, and the United States, including all of the last wills and testaments authored by Jamaican women and a substantial sample of Jamaican men’s wills. Although wealthier women have left behind faint traces in the archives, few collections of private letters, diaries, or journals have survived from the early colonial period. It is even more difficult to figure out how impoverished free and freed women survived. To depict the widest socioeconomic spectrum, I use a variety of source material to highlight broader trends.

7. The literature on slavery in British America is vast. However, the majority of the scholarship does not treat free and freed women as important agents of colonialism and slavery. In the Anglo-Atlantic context, historians have argued that the emergence of the racial categories that justified chattel slavery relied on divorcing white women from labor. Hilary McD. Beckles, for instance, writes that white women were considered unfit for manual labour on account of [their] endemic fragility, faint heart and delicate skin. See Beckles, Sex and Gender in the Historiography of Caribbean Slavery, in Verene Shepherd, Bridget Brereton, and Barbara Bailey, eds., Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective (New York, 1995), 133. See also Kathleen M. Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia (Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996); Rhys Isaac, Landon Carter’s Uneasy Kingdom: Revolution and Rebellion on a Virginia Plantation (New York, 2004); Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York, 1975); Richard S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713 (Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill, N.C., 1972); Philip D. Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill, N.C., 1998). The Caribbean, and Jamaica in particular, is normally characterized as an aggressively masculine space. Trevor Burnard, who has produced a substantial corpus of work on Jamaica, generally attributes the brutality and violence of colonial society to white men. Likewise, Vincent Brown concludes that Jamaica was intensively patriarchal, with white men controlling the island’s female inhabitants. See Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004); Burnard, ‘Rioting in Goatish Embraces’: Marriage and Improvement in Early British Jamaica, History of the Family, XI (2006), 185–197; Burnard, A Failed Settler Society: Marriage and Demographic Failure in Early Jamaica, Journal of Social History, XXVIII (1994), 63–82; and Brown, Reaper’s Garden. Natalie A. Zacek critiques these portrayals, writing that British colonies in the Caribbean were more than armed camps of aggressive men, or machines for the making of fortunes quickly dissipated by the lavish lifestyles of absentee planters. See Zacek, Between Lady and Slave: White Working Women in the Eighteenth-Century Leeward Islands, in Catterall and Campbell, eds., Women in Port, 150. She also offers a more-nuanced portrait of white manhood in the region; see Zacek, ‘Banes of Society’ and ‘Gentlemen of Strong Natural Parts’: Attacking and Defending West Indian Creole Masculinity, in Thomas A. Foster, ed., New Men: Manliness in Early America (New York, 2011), 116–133.

8. The work on enslaved women in the Caribbean has significantly enhanced our understanding of the gendered and sexualized dimensions of slavery. This substantial body of scholarship includes edited volumes such as Judith A. Byfield, LaRay Denzer, and Anthea Morrison, eds., Gendering the African Diaspora: Women, Culture, and Historical Change in the Caribbean and Nigerian Hinterland (Bloomington, Ind., 2010); and Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller, eds., Women and Slavery, II, The Modern Atlantic (Athens, Ohio, 2007). Scholarly monographs include Shawna Sweeney, A Free Enterprise: Market Women, Insurgent Economies, and the Making of Caribbean Freedom (unpublished manuscript); Sasha Turner, Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (Philadelphia, 2017); Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Urbana, Ill., 2016); Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives; Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia, 2004); Diana Paton, No Bond But the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–1870 (Durham, N.C., 2004); Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick, N.J., 1989); Marietta Morrissey, Slave Women in the New World: Gender Stratification in the Caribbean (Lawrence, Kans., 1989); Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Kingston, 1990); and Bernard Moitt, Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635–1848 (Bloomington, Ind., 2001).

9. A spate of scholarship over the past two decades has changed our understanding of how bodies were racialized and gendered in early America. See Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches; Kirsten Fischer, Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (Ithaca, N.Y., 2002); Jennifer M. Spear, Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans (Baltimore, 2009); Sharon Block, Rape and Sexual Power in Early America (Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006); Clare A. Lyons, Sex among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830 (Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006); and Morgan, Laboring Women. Kirsten Fischer and Jennifer Morgan have argued, however, that most of the scholarship on sexuality in early America focuses on white men, reducing both free and enslaved women to objects of male desire. See Fischer and Morgan, Sex, Race, and the Colonial Project, WMQ, 3d Ser., LX (2003), 197–198.

10. See Joan Wallach Scott, Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis, in Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), 45–46. Michel Foucault’s multipart definition of power is useful for theorizing the dynamics that existed between women enslavers and the people whom they held in captivity. I do not treat power as an institution or a structure. Instead, I study the ways women exercised their authority from innumerable points that show the interplay of nonegalitarian and mobile relations. The major domination of free over enslaved people on the island was the hegemonic effect of these countless confrontations (Foucault, The History of Sexuality, I, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley [New York, 1990], 92–94 [quotations, 94]). See Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. lady, http://www.oed.com. As Alexandra Shepard notes, the household functioned as the primary structural locus of male supremacy … and the marital relations at its core were the justification for men’s subordination of women in early modern England; see Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2003), 70. For more on women, gender, and the early modern household in Britain, see Amy Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (New York, 2005); and Margaret R. Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender,