Contested Bodies. Sasha Turner

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Figure 4. Sex Ratio on Golden Grove Estate, 1765–1810. 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.

      This demographic study further reveals a consistent gap in the age group fifteen to twenty-five across Jamaican parishes. The bulk of the slave population fell between ages twenty-five to forty-four. As one historian noted, “A common feature of the total populations was an erosion of the age pyramid between about 15 and 25 years.”¹³ Individual estates like Golden Grove reflect this pattern; 5.6 percent of its women were above age seventy, well beyond childbearing age. Girls with greatest reproductive promise, aged nine to seventeen, accounted for another 42 of 204 females at Golden Grove estate. Most women were field workers with “reputed age”¹⁴ between thirty and seventy years and therefore had a much lower reproductive potential.¹⁵ The age compositions of these properties tell us that the most pressing need was for greater proportions of women capable of bearing children. Francis Graham, attorney for Georgia estate, made this argument to his absentee employer, the owner of the property, Thomas Miller, when he explained why workers failed to reproduce. The estate simply had too many “old Gangs,” Graham wrote, and the only way to stimulate population growth was to buy young women.¹⁶

      Proprietors and attorneys attempted to alter not just the sex ratio of their populations but also the youth profiles of female slaves. In 1804, Rowland Fearon, the Jamaican-based attorney who managed Lord Penrhyn’s sugar estates, promised to buy “as many young girls,” more specifically, “growing women,” for the property.¹⁷ Other planters were more precise in defining what constituted young, “growing women.” The planter-historian William Beckford summarized, “age twelve to sixteen is in my opinion, the age group that is most likely to answer the future” reproductive needs.¹⁸ Females between ages twelve to sixteen were far “too young” to suit Simon Taylor, because they were more vulnerable to sexual abuse. “If girls are bought too young,” Taylor explained, “the fellows play the very devil with them, but after they are 16 or 18 there is no [sexual] danger.”¹⁹ Thomas Barritt, attorney at two estates belonging to Nathaniel Phillips, expressed a similar concern. Men (race unspecified) frequently lured the “young wenches” away from the estates. Unsuspecting young girls inveigled by men into “bad habits” were “being disordered.”²⁰ While sexual activity could increase the conception rate, overindulgence generated diseases with sterilizing effects on female fertility.²¹ Nothing else, testified Stephen Fuller, Jamaican agent in London reporting to Parliament, “impede[s] the natural increase of the Slaves [more] than” venereal diseases.²² Although Jamaican planters wished to purchase a greater number of younger females than they did prior to 1788, they considered captives between ages twelve and sixteen to approximately age twenty-five to be best suited for fulfilling their reproductive goals.

      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