A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia

Abstract

Richard S. Dunn, A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. x + 540 pp.REV IEWED B Y S T E V E N HE I SERichARD s. Dunn's Long AwAiteD MonogRAph coMpARing the lives of enslaved persons in Jamaica and Virginia arrived in 2014 amongst a crowded field of works similarly focused on slavery. Dunn's study of the Mesopotamia and Mount Airy Plantations rises head and shoulders above these works in both its scope and importance to the field of slavery studies. Dunn provides his readers a comprehensive look at what plantation life was like for both the masters and the enslaved who formed slavery's backbone in the Western Hemisphere.Two Plantations primarily relies on records of both the Barham and Tayloe families created to aid with the administration of their plantations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The Barham papers begin in 1762 and run - fairly completely - until 1833. For the Barhams, these annual assessments were a vital tool in helping them understand the state of their holdings in Jamaica, as they were largely absentee planters. Their records focused primarily on the age and occupation of the workforce, but ancillary details like names and gender help give a clearer picture of the state of the enslaved population on Mesopotamia plantation. These records were supplemented in part by the correspondence left behind by the Moravian mission that the Barhams supported from 1758 until 1836 at Mesopotamia. For the Tayloes, who had a much more intimate relationship with their enslaved workforce, the records that they kept started later. This makes it difficult to make a chronologically exact comparison, but the Tayloe inventories also document a major migration that happened within American slavery, as enslaved persons from the Tidewater and Chesapeake were sold off or transported to the newly settled southwestern territories. The Tayloes' records thus mainly kept track of where the enslaved persons they owned resided, and the work they performed. This was important because from 1833 to 1862 the Tayloe family forced 218 enslaved persons to migrate from Mount Airy to new holdings they had purchased in west central Alabama. Dunn expertly traces the lives of the voiceless enslaved whose labour helped the Barham and Tayloe families accumulate a great deal of wealth.One of the strengths of Two Plantations is that Dunn reconstructs the lives of individual enslaved persons to great effect. His subjects for chapters three and four - the families of Sarah Affir and Winney Grimshaw respectively - open a window into the personal challenges that the enslaved faced every day they were in bondage. Sarah Affir's descendants are of particular interest as her son Robert McAlpin - a mulatto who lived a life of general privilege amongst his fellow enslaved due in part to the status of his father, the plantation bookkeeper Andrew McAlpin - killed two fellow enslaved persons in brawls during his life out of an inherent sense of the dehumanising life of exhausting labour, debilitating disease, and demeaning social relationships (98) that even supposedly privileged enslaved persons endured. …