Abstract
We know relatively little about enslaved men, especially African-born men in British West Indian slave societies, in their roles as fathers and husbands within slave households. A generation of scholarship on gender in slave societies has tended to neglect enslaved men, thus allowing old understandings of enslaved men as not very involved with families drawn from biased planter sources to continue to shape scholarship. This article instead draws on a rich set of records (both quantitative and qualitative) from Berbice in British Guiana between 1819 and 1834 to explore enslaved men’s roles within informal marriages and as husbands and parents. We show not only that enslaved men were active participants in shaping family life within British West Indian slave societies but that they were aided and abetted in achieving some of their familial objectives by a sympathetic plantation regime in which white men favored enslaved men within enslaved households.
Highlights
How we do understand the texture of male lives under slavery in the Caribbean? In this article, we explore what the lives of enslaved men were like, focusing on their experiences as husbands, fathers, and members of families, as revealed by a rich set of records from early nineteenth-century Berbice
Our contention is that contrary to planter stereotypes of enslaved men as feckless, irresponsible, and unconcerned with family life, enslaved men in early nineteenth-century Berbice were significantly involved in families as husbands and fathers and that they sought to exert patriarchal authority, even if that patriarchal authority was compromised by the circumstances of enslavement
It was true that slave family life was full of constraints, but these tended to be related to the peculiar demography of slave societies and especially to the harsh conditions that slave owners forced upon their slaves
Summary
How we do understand the texture of male lives under slavery in the Caribbean? In this article, we explore what the lives of enslaved men were like, focusing on their experiences as husbands, fathers, and members of families, as revealed by a rich set of records from early nineteenth-century Berbice (part of what in 1831 became the colony of British Guiana). The copious but little explored records compiled between 1817 and 1834 of legal officials known as the Fiscal and the Protector of Slaves in Berbice allow us to see enslaved men performing a variety of roles—supportive and unsupportive—within family structures.6 These sources need some explanation, as most readers will be unfamiliar with them. The records of the Fiscals and Protectors of Slaves, which cover 1819 to 1834, comprise 24 large volumes that provide copious information about the lives of enslaved people, often quoting the words of enslaved people themselves about what concerned them They are far from being unbiased sources and, like all sources relating to slavery in the British Caribbean, were created and shaped by white people. If we are to better understand the gendered experience of enslavement in the British Caribbean, and especially masculinity, we cannot ignore men’s family experiences (Jemmott 2015)
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