Free Colored West Indians: A Racial Dilemma

Abstract

Free Colored West Indians: A Racial Dilemma David Lowenthal Slavery WAS SCARCELY a racial issue in the eighteenthcentury West Indies; it was a racial fact. Seventeenth-century Eu­ ropean entrepreneurs established tropical plantations in the Carib­ bean with African slave labor; their successors universally pre­ sumed all slaves to be black and all whites to be free. West Indian whites never seriously questioned the virtues of slavery as an insti­ tution until Europe forced emancipation on them in the nineteenth century. West Indian contrasts with the North American colonies are striking. During the eighteenth century, more and more Ameri­ cans considered slavery morally repugnant and socially dangerous. By the time of the American Revolution, most of the northern colonies had abolished slavery, and many southerners, themselves reluctant slaveholders, sought to limit its scope and to abolish the slave trade so as to promote eventual emancipation. Most Ameri­ cans viewed the "peculiar institution" as a source of unmitigated evil.1 But in the West Indies, slavery was not a peculiar institution, it was a universal one. There were ten slaves to every non-slave, and few free men of any complexion regarded Negro slavery as immoral or unjust. Notwithstanding the ubiquitous character of West Indian Ne­ gro slavery, two kinds of people constituted categories outside the system: whites who were not free, and non-whites who were free. Emigration soon eliminated the first: a hundred thousand white indentured servants, made redundant by African slavery on the sugar estates, streamed out of the Caribbean to the Atlantic sea­ 335 Racism in the Eighteenth Century board of North America and elsewhere. The few thousand poor whites who remained endured general contempt for ways of life little distinguishable from those of slaves; indeed, many called them 'white Negroes.” West Indians who were free but not white were a more serious and pervasive anomaly. These were of two kinds. Some were slaves who had fled plantation servitude to the mountainous and wooded hinterlands, whence they sporadically raided towns and estates while avoiding recapture. Two substantial groups of runaways and rebels, the Maroons of Jamaica and the Bush Negro tribes of Surinam and French Guiana, resisted all efforts to subdue them; colonial regimes and European empires had to treat with them as self-governing black enclaves, which have maintained their auton­ omy up to the present time. Rebel slaves in French St. Domingue went much further: they brought down the plantocracy and ex­ pelled the whites. Even in the smaller islands, some runaway slave hideouts survived for generations, a remote but ominous presence of which slaveowners always had to take notice. Rebel and runaway slaves remained essentially outside the West Indian social order, however, when they did not entirely over­ whelm it; they constituted a force to be reckoned with, not one that invited intimate commingling. The opposite was true of the free colored—those set free or born free, often the offspring of planters and slaves. Free colored West Indians were an integral part of the social order, and they accepted its regulations and internalized its values, even the perspectives that denigrated them. The free colored population grew slowly until the middle of the eighteenth century and thereafter became increasingly numerous. By the time of emancipation they outnumbered whites everywhere but Jamai­ ca, Barbados, and the Leeward Islands. This essay discusses the conflicts between racial theory and prac­ tice engendered by West Indian acceptance of this free colored element, ambiguously positioned between black and white. I shall refer primarily to British, French, and Dutch colonies in and around the Caribbean, 'where large-scale plantations and African slavery were generally more pervasive and came earlier than in Latin America and mainland North America. But this framework 336 Free Colored West Indians is at once too narrow and too sweeping. The non-Hispanic West Indies, which included most of the islands and Guiana in South America, developed patterns of culture and society that set them off from Latin America.2 But in contrast with the slave states of North America the condition of the free colored in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Brazil, and the Spanish American mainland in many ways re­ sembled that in the West Indies.3...