WAS SLAVERY DIFFERENT IN TRINIDAD?

A discussion of T&T’s history of slavery from noted historian Bridget Brereton from the Trinidad Express.

As an institution, slavery in Trinidad was essentially the same as in the other Caribbean colonies, especially those belonging to France and Britain. Enslaved people were legally chattels bought and sold like any other type of property, advertised for sale in the Trinidad newspapers, and listed on estate inventories along with the livestock and the equipment.

Slavery was hereditary, inherited through the mother (so the child of an enslaved mother and a free man was born into slavery), and lifelong. Manumission (the grant of freedom) was rare even in the last years of slavery when Britain was supposedly trying to encourage it. Harsh laws determined how the enslaved were controlled and punished. Enslaved people had no legally respected rights to marriage or family and were (before 1824 in Trinidad) more or less at the mercy of their owners, just short of the power of life and death.

As I’ve done on many previous occasions, I want to emphasize that it is only a myth that slavery in Trinidad was somehow more “benevolent” than elsewhere in the Caribbean. Spain had a reputation for being a more humane slave-holding power than Britain or France, and Trinidad was Spanish to 1797. But the methods of managing the enslaved that prevailed in Trinidad were those of the French immigrant planters, not the Spanish, and they brought some brutal practices of punishment and terror.

Fear of poisoning by enslaved person Obeahmen, and the frightening memory of what had happened in French Saint Domingue (Haiti) after 1791, were extreme among the French planters who set the tone for the new slave society that emerged in Trinidad in the 1780s and 1790s. The British, after they took the island in 1797, followed suit. Severe punishments and brutal reprisals for those accused of resistance, conspiracy to rebel, or poisoning were meted out in the 1790s and early 1800s.

The harsh frontier conditions endured by the enslaved in these decades, when tropical forests were cleared by manual labor, and new plantations carved out of the bush, resulted in very high rates of disease and death among them. Once the transatlantic trade was ended, Trinidad’s enslaved population declined steadily. There were about 20,000 enslaved in 1802; by 1838, roughly the same number were emancipated, despite many thousands from Africa up to 1807 and from the Caribbean islands after that.

It wasn’t just that enslaved death rates were very high for infants, children, and adults. Birth rates were meager indeed. Most enslaved women had to labor in the fields, doing hard manual labor; they were poorly fed and often suffering from diseases. So their fertility was low, and miscarriages and stillbirths must have been very frequent.

So the main lines of slavery as an institution were the same as elsewhere in the Caribbean. But there were some significant differences in the Trinidad experience.

First, Trinidad was a slave society—that is, a society in which slavery was the dominant labor system and social institution—for a reasonably short period, about fifty years, from the 1780s to the 1830s. This, perhaps, was the fastest such experience of any significant Caribbean territory and contrasted sharply with Barbados or Martinique, for example, with their 200 years of slavery.

Second, Trinidad never did become a classic or mature slave society, with the vast majority of enslaved people, often well over 90 percent in islands like Jamaica or Tobago. In 1797, when the British captured the island, just over 50 percent of the population were enslaved; in 1810, it was 67 percent, and this was probably the highest percentage up to emancipation. From the 1780s on, Trinidad had a substantial free colored and free black group. So the vast enslaved majorities and tiny white and free colored/free black groups—typical of mature slave societies—never appeared there.

Third, in Trinidad, the core group, the original cohort of enslaved Africans, were Creoles, born in the French West Indies and Grenada, brought with their owners from the 1770s to the early 1800s. They spoke Patois, went through mass baptisms in the Catholic faith, and got an Afro-French Creole culture. Captives from Africa came later, after 1790, with a peak in 1797-1806. This meant that Trinidad had a high proportion of African-born people well into the 1820s-1830s, unlike Barbados.

Finally, many slave-owners in Trinidad were small or medium estate owners, so the enslaved tended to live in smaller units (under 50) than in Jamaica or Barbados. A significant number were urban: nearly 25 percent lived in Port of Spain in 1813. Few lived on vast plantations, and many lived on coffee, cotton, and cocoa estates. This meant that Trinidad was different from many of the Caribbean islands where the great majority of the enslaved lived and worked on large sugar plantations, as in Tobago. Moreover, many were owned by free colored/free black people.

These differences shaped a somewhat different legacy for post-emancipation Trinidad, even though slavery itself was as brutal and dehumanizing as anywhere else.

For the original report, go to http://www.trinidadexpress.com/commentaries/Was_slavery_different_in_Trinidad_-129242193.html