Work-related accidents and death rates peaked among workers during the January-to-June sugar harvest because sugar mills and boiling houses worked nonstop to prevent spoilage. The multiple and strenuous demands of harvest meant that concessions to workers, like expectant and new mothers, were even more limited. As well as organizing workers into three primary field gangs, some plantations also divided them into task gangs based on their perceived physical abilities and health. The first or great gang, dominated by women, performed the most demanding field tasks, like cutting, bundling, and carrying canes. Second gang workers assisted in tying and carrying cane bundles and fed cane stalks into cattle-drawn, wind, or water mills, which crushed the cane to extract its juice. Third gang workers removed residual trash called bagasse from the milling areas and brought them to the boiling house. Dried bagasse provided fuel for boiling the extracted cane juice. Because the sucrose content of sugarcane deteriorates soon after harvesting, the reaping, milling, and boiling of cane and cane juice had to be closely synchronized. Sugar mills and boilers therefore operated uninterrupted, with workers changing shift throughout the night to prevent canes and juice from fermenting.19 Summing up the intensity of the production process, one contemporary explained, “We keep about the works and the boiling of sugar the whole night, from which circumstance we commonly divide our gang into three spells of boilers, people to attend the mill, and to carry out cane trash.”20 Although female workers and young children played what planters viewed as unskilled, supporting roles as mill feeders and trash carriers in the sugar factory, they were no less affected by strict discipline of the harvest.
The unrelenting work regimes of the sugar plantations, combined with inadequate and nutritionally unsound diets, debilitating punishments, unsanitary living conditions, and poor medical care had fatal consequences for mothers and children. Enslaved women mothered few sons and daughters because of low fertility and frequent miscarriages. Of the children who survived their precarious gestation, more than one-half died before their second birthday. To secure the survival of their offspring expectant and new mothers had to strike a delicate balance between their physically taxing, quick-paced jobs and the demands of pregnancy and motherhood. Members of enslaved people’s communities helped to deliver babies and attend to the hygiene and medical needs of new mothers and newborns.
Despite the precariousness of motherhood, enslaved women and community members eked out a small measure of autonomy by having to fend for themselves with childbearing. Ironically, planter preoccupation with the productive rhythms of their estates freed women and community members from their oversight. Enslaved people therefore cultivated their own approaches to caring for mothers and their children. By the 1780s, when abolitionist activists articulated reform and abolition through women’s reproductive capacities, enslaved mothers and community members had already developed autonomous social networks and customs around maternal and infant care. These practices would become a central point of conflict between enslaved community members, planters, and doctors.
The links abolitionists made between emancipation and reproduction not only stimulated changes in how enslaved women and children experienced labor and discipline and gave rise to conflicts over how to care for the bodies of women and children. They also generated documentation that provides insight into enslaved people’s birth and maternal practices that previously had been absent from official records. Responding to abolitionists’ efforts to capture the inhumanity of slavery, the British Parliament created several investigative committees between 1789 and 1792. These committees were tasked with assessing the conditions of the laboring populations of Britain’s West Indian colonies.21 Witnesses were called from various branches of the slaving system and included slave traders, doctors, and planters. While such proslavery witnesses pathologized slaves and exaggerated their own benevolence, their disparagement of what they perceived as the unhygienic, medically unsound, and unsafe birth and child-rearing practices of the enslaved gives us unprecedented insight into enslaved people’s intimate relations, birth, and child-care rituals.
Witness accounts, however, must be read with great care and in the context of other sources, such as medical records and doctor correspondence. The number of those accounts grew because slaveholder interest in procreation, coupled with the rise of academic medicine, increased the presence of professional doctors in the colonies. Although medical practitioners sometimes aligned themselves with planters, they were also interested in professionalizing medicine in the colonies and published manuals and accounts of their observations and treatments. Physicians who discussed the changing health and treatment of the enslaved offer additional insights into pronatal interventions and help to counterbalance some of the self-serving reports given by parliamentary witnesses.
The process of ending British West Indian slavery was a long and tedious affair. Scholars typically divide the process into two phases. The first phase starts with the rise of abolitionism in 1780 and ends in 1807 with the abolition of the slave trade. The antislavery campaigns of the 1820s and the 1833 Emancipation Act mark the beginning and end of the second phase. This division reflects not only the split between activism against the slave trade and antislavery. It also signals differences in the nature of reforms, or amelioration. While the imperial Parliament gathered evidence on the inhumanity and immorality of slavery and the slave trade between 1789 and 1807, West Indian legislatures passed new laws aimed at ameliorating the material conditions of slavery. These laws focused on areas abolitionists singled out in their criticisms of the slave system as well as on matters planters worked out as important to improve slaves’ welfare. The new legislation, for example, required masters to provide slaves with food, clothing, housing, medical care, and religious instruction, as well as reward mothers with more relaxed work routines. The laws also made masters liable for negligence or excessive cruelty toward their slaves. The 1788 Act for “the better Order and Government of Slaves,” or the Consolidated Slave Act, in particular, gave bonded workers the right to seek legal redress by taking their cases to a justice of the peace, who was then required to convene a Council of Protection. This new legislation tasked councils with investigating and bringing enslaved people’s complaints before the Assize Court or Supreme Court.22
Perceived failure of amelioration led to the passage of the 1816 Slave Registration Act, which required planters to record the birth, death, sale, and manumission of their slaves. Although this act was a backdoor method of tracking the illegal importation of slaves, the registers it generated are invaluable to the historian for the rich demographic details they provide on fertility, infant and child mortality, and cause of death. Claiming that the situation of mothers and children remained unchanged, abolitionists shifted attention away from slave trading and mounted a more explicit attack against slavery in the 1820s. The British Parliament took a leading role in reforming the law of slavery by sending blueprints of ameliorative legislation to West Indian assemblies for local adoption. The lively debates in the Jamaican Assembly over the adoption of imperially mandated laws of the 1820s illustrate how the colonies worked out the details of amelioration and give us further insight into the perception planters had of enslaved women and children, and their place in the future of the colonies. The expectation that enslaved women would remain in perpetual bondage as brute workers conflicted with abolitionist insistence that reforming the condition of women and children was a stepping stone toward freedom.
Difficulties of legal enforcement have led historians to conclude that legislative reforms were ineffective.23 Admittedly, ameliorative laws and councils had very little effect because those charged with enforcing slave laws held investments in slaves and therefore had an interest in limiting enslaved people’s liberties. Moreover, slaveholders’ continued drive for capital gains through agroindustrial output conflicted with the need to relax the demands they placed on women, particularly those who were pregnant and were already mothers. Legislative reforms, however, created a new space in which enslaved parents and community members publicly avowed their social ties and articulated their discontent with continued threats against their friends and family. The limited prerogative enslaved people had to take their masters to court, for example, was a new freedom that many mothers and fathers capitalized on to protect their families. Court