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Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda, 1616-1782. . - Reviews - book review

Journal of Social History, Winter, 2001 by Robert L. Paquette

Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda, 1616-1782. By Virginia Bernhard (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 1999 xvii plus 3l6pp. $37.50).

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The first English colonists in the Americas crossed the Atlantic glorying in English liberties and without the intention of enslaving anyone. Yet, at the outbreak of the American Revolution English colonists owned more slaves than any of their European counterparts, and English merchants led the world in freighting African slaves to the Americas. England established a permanent foothold in Bermuda in 1612. This lonely archipelago, lying like a jagged fishhook in the North Atlantic more than 600 miles off the coast of North Carolina, had no indigenous inhabitants and offered settlers ample sustenance in a salubrious climate strategically located on the flank of Spanish domains. The first slave arrived from the West Indies in 1616, but plantation agriculture, despite some early success with tobacco, proved difficult on these cedar-strewn islands that together cover about twenty square miles-an area less than half the size of Nantucket. In 1663, most Bermudian landholders owned fifty acres or less, and the size of the average landholding diminished markedly during the next hundred years. Aspiring young planters moved elsewhere. Those Bermudians, black and white, who stayed behind shifted decisively in the seventeenth century into saltwater pursuits: fishing, shipbuilding, salvage, and seaborne trade. Although Bermuda never supported more than 6000 slaves, it developed one of the more unusual slave societies in the history of the Americas.

Virginia Bernhard vacationed in Bermuda in 1980 and was struck by the civility of the multiracial society. A tourist's curiosity about the present flamed into a professional historian's passionate quest for understanding the past. Masters and slaves, she discovered, had lived and worked together in a small world of cramped households in which an impressive degree of interracial intimacy and cultural sharing occurred. The first generations of white Bermudians appear to have had more trouble than their white Virginian or West Indian contemporaries in crossing that fateful threshold from servitude to slavery. Surviving contracts from the first half of the seventeenth century, Bernhard points out, speak almost exclusively of black and white indentures, not slaves, although, ominously, the customary term of service for blacks ran "four score and 19 years." Not until the 1680s does the word "slave" become a normative word in the public records. Bermuda never imported many African slaves, probably less than 5000 in its history. Indeed, white Bermudians, unnerved by the discovery of a slave conspiracy in 1673, passed a law the following year to prohibit the traffic in "Negroes, Indians, and Mallatoes." Bermuda's male and female slaves, present in roughly equal numbers, married, formed families, and reproduced themselves naturally within several decades of colonization.

The white population also grew steadily and would outnumber the black population by a small majority for most of the period covered by Bernhard. She estimates, based on a sample of wills and inventories dating from 1663 to 1707, that at least eighty percent of white heads of household owned slaves, although they typically did so in small numbers that included children. The largest Bermudian slaveholder in 1663 owned only seventeen slaves. About one third of Bermudian masters during the second half of the seventeenth century owned only one or two slaves. Slaveholding was far more widespread on Bermuda than in England's colonies on the North American mainland, but in Bermuda, Bernhard insists, no powerful, self-conscious slaveholding class emerged.

With the standard of the other English colonies in the Americas ever in mind, Bernhard characterizes Bermudian masters as generally responsible and concerned about their slaves' well-being. In a diversifying economy they recognized the value of skilled, acculturated, and literate slaves and presided over a rather loose, easygoing system of control. "From one end of Bermuda to the other, slaveholders of ordinary means as well as the affluent recognized and approved of slave marriages, often named slave children for themselves or for members of their families, usually bequeathed slaves to relatives, avoided breaking up slave families, sometimes manumitted individuals, and almost never sold them (p. 116)." Most members of Bermuda's overwhelmingly creole slave population lived within their master's home. Whites and blacks had frequent sexual relations. Restrictive laws existed, but they often went unenforced and their wording shows less of the racist poison to be found elsewhere in English America. White and blac k Protestants worshiped in the same churches. During his ministry in Bermuda from 1755 to 1772 the Reverend Alexander Richardson counted more black than white baptisms, 1,535 to 1,118. No Bermudian assembly ever passed a law forbidding whites from teaching slaves to read and write. Many Bermudian slaves traveled about the islands visibly armed, and in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries whites mustered slaves into the militia.

Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda, 1616-1782. . - Reviews - book review

Journal of Social History, Winter, 2001 by Robert L. Paquette

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