Planter reform was at odds with the more generalized adjustments that abolitionists proposed. Abolitionists like James Ramsay and William Wilberforce insisted on a generally younger female population in order to stimulate population growth. Yet they did not anticipate the difficulties of having a population of females who were too young. Planters who witnessed and participated in the sexual abuse of enslaved women and girls understood the vulnerabilities of young girls. Their refusal to buy girls younger than twelve to sixteen reflected these abusive realities of slavery. Planters did not simply attempt to buy young girls, as abolitionists recommended, but specifically purchased girls old enough to defend themselves from unwanted sexual advances. Ironically, planters recognized and welcomed enslaved people’s agency when it suited their needs. At other times when it interfered with planter power and sexual access, they denounced enslaved people’s efforts to exercise autonomy.
The demand for younger females in their childbearing years increased not only because individual planters diverted their focus toward biological reproduction but also because new governmental trading regulations provided tax relief for the importation of females below age twenty-five. In 1792, Henry Dundas, adviser to the British prime minister, proposed a new bill regulating the age and sex of Africans imported to the British colonies. Echoing the pronatal plans of the imperial bureaucrat Maurice Morgan, who as noted earlier in 1772 devised a plan to wean planters from their dependence on the slave trade, Dundas argued that time should be given to “encourage merchants and planters to try fairly the scheme of rearing a sufficient number of native Negroes to answer the purpose of cultivating the plantations.” This proposal required planters to buy greater proportions of young women because they were “more likely to reproduce than were persons of advanced age.”23 Although the House of Lords rejected Dundas’s proposal for an imperial adoption of a tax incentive on the purchase of younger females, colonial governments like the Jamaican Assembly adopted a similar measure. In 1797, the Assembly passed “an Act for laying a duty on all Negro slaves that shall be imported into this island from the coast of Africa who shall be above a certain age.” By this act, women above age twenty-five attracted an additional £10 tax. In communicating the successful adoption of the bill, Assembly members reported that it was “readily adapted” because of its “promised advantages.” Restricting imported Africans to those below age twenty-five, Assembly members iterated, not only promised to boost natural increase but also had the potential to reduce the number of “aged” workers incapable of acquiring “habits of industry.”24
Despite increased planter demands and government incentives, young females continued arriving in Jamaica’s ports in fewer numbers than males. The transatlantic slave trade database shows significant growth in total imported Africans within the last decades of legal slave trading. However, the average percentage of males remained consistently greater than females (except for the years 1798–1806 and 1808, for which we have no data on sex ratios).25 Males accounted for 61.80 percent of the total number of Africans brought into Jamaica for the entire period of legal slave trading (1659–1808) and 63.80 percent during the abolitionist period (1788–1808).26 The closest approximation of the age of females imported into Jamaica is reached by looking at the ratio of children, crudely defined by slave traders as young people below four feet four inches.27 The average number of children brought into Jamaica shows a downward trend between 1788 and 1808. In 1788, children were 24.90 percent of African imports. These rates declined steadily for the next seven years (to 1795) when the average import was 11.88 percent. By 1796 the number of children imported to Jamaica fell to 7.22 percent; by 1797 it had increased slightly to 8.27 percent. The following year imported children increased to 16 percent. Broadly speaking, children bought between 1788 and 1808 amounted to just 15.66 percent.28 Of these totals, fewer girls arrived in Jamaica than boys. Over the ten-year period 1788–98, boys arrived in Jamaica at twice the rate of girls for at least four years. In 1789, for the 17.45 percent of slaves who were children landing in Jamaica, there were 8.05 percent who were girls. By 1798, the ratio of boys to girls had more than doubled. Boys approximated 11.5 percent in comparison to 4.5 percent for girls.
Table 1. Negroes Purchased for Worthy Park Estate, 1784–93
Source: Worthy Park Accounts of Increase and Decrease, Worthy Park Estate Plantation Books, 1783–1837, Jamaica Government Archives, Spanish Town, Jamaica.
Purchase patterns for some individual properties, like Worthy Park estate, show some attempt to buy at least equal proportions of women and men throughout the 1780s, and in at least one year (1792) this property made an additional purchase of sixteen boys and sixteen girls plus six children (sex unspecified) (Table 1). The records for other properties, such as Golden Grove estate, show no consistent pattern in gender- or age-specific purchases (Figure 5). In some years, its attorney, Simon Taylor, purchased more men than women, and the reverse in other years. Golden Grove’s purchase accounts inconsistently record age (boys, girls, or children), but its fluctuating buying patterns suggest that uncertainties of the trade could make buying patterns unpredictable. Despite abolitionist insistence and government regulations that planters buy more young women, planter purchases did not reflect such gender preferences.
Figure 5. New Negroes Known to Have Been Purchased for Golden Grove Estate, 1765–94. Source: Compiled from Betty Wood and T. R. Clayton, “Slave Birth, Death and Disease on Golden Grove Plantation, Jamaica, 1765–1810,” Slavery and Abolition 6, no. 2 (1985): 99–121.
The fact that young women did not dominate the number of captive Africans landing in Jamaica suggests that despite preferences planters expressed, the constraints of the slave trade ultimately determined the sex and age of cargo available to Jamaican planters.29 Scholars debate the reasons for the sex and age ratios of Africans imported into the Americas. Some scholars argue that fewer females were available for the transatlantic trade because regional trades in Africa valued women as more important for agricultural production than men.30 Others assert that both women and men were integral to West African agriculture and that other factors such as the type of crop produced, warfare, judicial processes, and strategies of enslavement were important determinants of the slave trade’s age and gendered composition and variation over time.31 Social and political conditions in Africa were also important factors that determined the availability of young women and girls for export into the Americas.32
Market demands also influenced the sex and age of Africans transported into the American markets. Slave traders would buy Africans from dealers not just according to what the market offered but also according to what they calculated would yield greatest profits. From the earliest years of the slave trade, West Indian buyers established their sex preferences. Moreover, when traders did not deliver according to market demands in the Americas, their buyers chastised them and paid very little for the undesired cargo. John Barnes, governor of the slave trading fort of Senegal, reported that merchants rejected African captives for several reasons.33 Chief among these was that the expected resale value of Africans did not exceed their original purchase price.34 Merchants refused to trade cargo who they calculated “were not worth their freight” for transportation to the Americas.35
While Caribbean planters made clear their preferences for age and sex they were unwilling to buy slaves who were ailing, maimed, or otherwise disabled, even if such consignment suited the other stated desires of buyers. The overriding concern among Jamaican buyers