Slavery and Plantations have always been linked, influenced by economic goals (Williams 1994), from the initial amount of sugarcane cultivation in the Caribbean. Despite the complexity of the occurrences and circumstances that created this marriage, sugar progress and slavery both were booming during the relatively peaceful early on years of the 18th century. The European need for glucose had been increasing, and England's sugar demands led the load up. The English islands like T&T were a mono-crop culture, with few settlers growing not sugarcane
The Business of Slavery
The Triangular Trade is a term commonly found in conversations of the slave trade. Slaves would be brought from Africa to the plantations, which would send sugars and other local goods to European countries, who would in turn send goods to Africa. The products usually delivered to Africa were guns and other made items because there is no industry in Africa. In the Western world Indian islands like T&T, however, the offering of slaves was an important part of the economy. The necessity for much more slaves was always higher than the market could provide, and the Western Indian companies were opened up in the 1700s to outdoors trade to help provide additional slaves to colonies that produced glucose. The French inspired this trade on their islands by exempting slaves from most import and export taxes.
Life on Plantations
Working Conditions: Slave Labour in Plantations
'the toughest season, a season of toil from sunrise to twilight, bare ankles and calves stung by cowitch, knotted muscles slashed by cane leaves that cut like right razors, backs separated open by the whip'
The plantation land contains cane-fields, provision grounds, woodland and pasture. Each planter preferred to have significantly more than 200 acres of cane land. Provision grounds were used by the slaves to cultivate main vegetation, plantains and fruit and vegetables for food. The woodland provided lumber and firewood and the pasture was used for grazing cattle (Handler 1965). The cane fields had either newly planted canes or ratoons. The ratoons were new shoots growing from old cane roots which were kept in the ground after a previous crop of cane was harvested. Usually a ratoon field was less effective. A typical sweets estate had factory buildings such as the mill, boiling house and curing house. Around these factory buildings there were other smaller buildings and sheds in which, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, carpenters, masons, coopers and other artisan slaves worked. There would also be a tiny "hospital" for suffering slaves, and a little "jail" which stored slaves who were being punished. There have been storage space rooms for tools and products and sheds which sheltered livestock or stored cane trash or bagasse which was used as petrol. Not definately not the factory structures were small residences in which the European managers and supervisors resided. These were generally overseers, book-keepers, skilled craftsmen and office staff. In the biggest house resided the real estate owner. The slave quarters were some distance from the homes of the managers.
A work day consisted of 15-16 hours per day, during harvest time and, could continue during harvest and milling for 16-18 weekly 7 days weekly and relating to Stampp (1956) the slaves received the task to prepare the land for planting. Their normal working day started out before daybreak and concluded after sunset. They cleared the grass and bushes by weeding and using up (children between your age ranges of six and ten might be active as water carriers while children between your age groups of ten and twelve were sorted out into gangs and put to weeding). Cane openings were dug and into these cane tops were planted. As the cane grew, gangs of slaves manured the field and weeded bushes that sprang up about the cane plants. Female slaves did much of the weeding and the manuring. After 12 to 15 weeks the cane was now adult. The field was set afire to melt away the leaves from the cane stalks and at the same time to reduce snakes which lived there. The field slaves, using cutlasses, then slice the cane stalks, jam-packed them in bundles and packed them to ox-drawn carts which carried those to the mill. With the mill, the cane was smashed and the juice flowed through gutters to large material storage containers. The cane trash was removed and stored for use as petrol for the boilers. The drink in the top pots was clarified by home heating and the addition of a tiny quantity of lime. This clarified juice was then ladled into a copper boiler in which it was boiled. After a while, the juice from this copper boiler was ladled into an inferior boiler and was boiled again and then even more in a yet smaller boiler. At that time, it had became sticky syrup that was allowed to cool, and then poured into wooden hogsheads standing on beams in the healing house. Through small holes at the bottom of the hogsheads, molasses seeped out and was accumulated in containers arranged below the beams. After around three weeks, the rest of the syrup in the hogsheads crystallised to create sugar. The sugar remained in the hogsheads that have been later stuffed into ships for export to Europe. Some estates also manufactured rum by fermenting drink from the first boiling and about the same quantity of molasses. Almost all of this specialised work completed in the manufacture of glucose and rum was done by skilled artisan slaves who had been highly appreciated by their owners. Through the milling season, slaves performed in shifts during the day and evening.
Even after the crop season was over, the estate owner didn't allow his slaves to be idle. The fields needed to be ready for the new crop, weeding and manuring of the ratoons needed to be done, and auto repairs to drainage and irrigation canals, fences and properties had to carry out. Work was even found for children from age six years old. They collected firewood, cut grass to feed farm family pets and fetched drinking water to slaves employed in the domains. The plantation owners did not want their slaves to entail themselves in idle conversation since they experienced that the discontented slaves might use the occasion to plot rebellion.
Punishments
While each plantation acquired its own group of social, spiritual, and labour codes, all had the basic format for an instilled hierarchy in which the slave professional reigned as gad. He taken care of the aspect of slave misery, by handling the amount of pain (Starobin 1974). Treatments were given such as mutilation, branding, chaining, and murder that have been supposedly regulated or prohibited for legal reasons. Whippings, beatings, drownings, and hangings were as unstable as these were gruesome.
It was clear to plantation owners that slavery cannot survive without the whip (even though owners were forbidden to deliberately destroy or maliciously mutilate a slave). Men and women were whipped indiscriminately. The severity of whipping depended on the amount of strokes to the type of whip. Fifteen to twenty lashes were generally sufficient, nevertheless they could range much higher. Other items used for punishments included shares, chains, collars, and irons. It had been also commonplace that women could be raped by the owner of the plantation, his sons or, any white male.
Methods of Control
The White plantation owners in T&T used various solutions to maintain complete control over their slaves. Their primary method was that of "divide and rule". Customers of the same tribe were segregated on different plantations to prevent communication between them. Desire to behind this is to avoid any plans to rebel if indeed they were together. This parting, however, created a issue of communication, since the plantation would have different sets of slaves speaking different dialects. Therefore, the planters experienced to discover a way to talk to their slaves. Soon a new vocabulary, known as Creole, developed which became the tongue among the list of slaves. Once the British required control of the twin islands in the nineteenth century, English words were injected in to the dialect and it became the foundation of the Creolised words.
Slaves were also avoided from practising their religions. A number of slaves were Muslims even though many others experienced their own tribal beliefs. But because the Christian planters observed non-Christians as pagans, they made sure that the slaves could not accumulate to worship in the manner these were accustomed when they resided in Africa.
Later Christian missionaries were permitted on the plantations and they were permitted to preach to the slaves on Sundays. With time, most of them were changed into Christianity; it was the overall sense that the modified slaves became docile and was not willing to support rebellion on the plantations.
Another means of control was the creation of your class system on the list of slaves. Field slaves made the cheapest group, even though some of them had special skills.
The lowest ranking slaves, the backbone of the plantation overall economy, were the field slaves. The field slaves were divided into 'gangs' according to their physical strength and potential, with the best and fittest males and females in the first gang. The motivation used to encourage effort, was lashes of the cart whip, which were freely administered by the motorists, who had been 'privileged' slaves under the overseer's supervision. Higher the slave hierarchy were the artisan slaves such as blacksmiths, carpenters and masons, who had been often appointed out by the planters. These slaves also experienced opportunities to earn money for themselves on various occasions. Still higher up in this class system were the individuals who had been specially picked by the White planters to regulate the other slaves. The home or house slave got a special place in this design, and because they proved helpful in the master's house and sometimes receiving special favours from the expert, they organised other slaves in contempt. Usually, the slaves in the lowest rung of the public ladder were the ones who rebelled and often domestic slaves were the ones who betrayed them by confirming the plots to their master.
Then there have been divisions predicated on colour. In the first days, it was not too difficult for a real African to rise to the level of a driver. But mixtures occurred through the birth of children consequently of unions between White men and black women (mulatto), White men and mulatto women (mestee) and mulatto men and black women (sambo). Some slaves of succeeding generations thus experienced lighter complexions, and the White planters discriminated in favour of them. These slaves with White fathers or White family members were put in positions above those of the field slaves. This was the beginning of coloring discrimination in the Guyanese culture. Of course, in all of the, the Europeans - the Whites - occupied the best rung of the social ladder plus they found ready allies one of the mixed or colored society who occupied the intermediate levels. The pure Africans continued to be at the lowest level
Women and Slavery in the Plantations
According to Bush (1990; 33) the primary reason behind the existence of women in T&T before slavery was because of their labour value. In the early times of slavery, plantation owners attemptedto produce healthy habits of duplication and encourage relationship, but found it was financially illogical to do so. Instead, it was more profitable to acquire new slaves from Africa (before continued way to obtain feminine slaves being shipped from across the Atlantic was threatened by abolitionist pressure in the eighteenth century). Girls worked on estates from the early time of four. Occupations for women between the age range of 12-19 mixed from field work, to stock work, to domestic work, to washing e. g. clothing, dishes, etc. ( Reddock 1985 pg. 64 ), . Other kinds of work for adult women included midwife, doctoress, and housekeeper. European plantation owners generally deemed most slave women as suitable for field work, which contains jobs such as digging openings for canes, weeding, and hoeing. In Jamaica, most women between the age groups of 19 and 54 were employed in the domains.
By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, there have been more women working in the field than men because of their lower mortality rates. Despite the common stereotype whereby men are stronger and more bodily ready than women, it can be argued that ladies were as important, if not more important, to field work during the period of slavery in T&T. The need for ladies in the plantation market is shown in the price of feminine slaves between 1790 and the finish of the slave trade. The price for a "new" male slave was about 50-70, as the price for a fresh feminine slave was around 50-60. (Bush, 1996:33)
Apart from occupations such as doctoress, midwife, and housekeeper, that have been regarded as higher employment positions for slave women at that time, the slave elite was nearly totally composed of men. Women were confined to preventing for lower positions in the socio-economic hierarchy and were always excluded from the more esteemed and skilled jobs (i. e. carpentry). Among the list of limited amount of occupations open to Trinbagonian slave women, the most renowned job was found to be medical.
One way in which women slaves would once in a while amass income and resources for themselves was through intimacy trade (Morrissey 1989 pg. 69). This is a common way for women slaves to save lots of money for freedom, particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in T&T. The majority of enslaved domestic staff in towns were likely to support themselves through prostitution.
Culture of Slavery and Plantation life
Home
Plantation slaves were housed in slave's cabins. Small, rudely built of logs with clapboard sidings, with clay chinking. Flooring were packed mud. They were leaky and drafty and the blend of wet, dirt, and cool made them diseased conditions. On the plantation, the slaves were housed in structures that have been some distance away from the master's house. Many of these slave houses acquired thatched roofs and wall space of old boards or of wattle and dirt. The ground was the earth itself and there have been no furniture except some rudimentary items that the slaves were able to make.
Clothing
Slaves weren't well-clothed; they had inadequate clothing for individuals employed in heavy labour all 12 months. Children would dress in long tee shirts. Men possessed little besides with two tops and two cotton jeans. Women were given an inadequate amount of towel and made their own clothes. The towel was cheap materials, produced in Great britain that was dubbed "Negro cloth". The slaves also obtained a clothing allowance approximately every year. The men received a coarse woollen coat, a hat, about six back yards of cotton, and a bit of canvas to make a pair or two of trousers. Women received the same allowance as the men, but children received nothing. The children continued to be naked until these were about nine yrs. old, or received cast-off clothing that their parents were able to find or were able to purchase.
Food
The food was generally satisfactory in large, but imbalanced and monotonous. Typical food allowance was a peck of corn meal and three to four pounds of sodium pork or bacon per week per person. This diet could be supplemented by fruit and vegetables from their gardens, by seafood or wild game, and molasses (not usually). The slaves ready their own food and transported it out to the field in buckets. As the slaves were provided with certain foodstuffs by the expert, they brought up their own subsistence plants of fruit and vegetables, plantains and root plants on small garden plots that the expert allowed those to use. However, they could only do their personal farming on Sundays when that they had no work on the plantation. They also took the possibility to fish on Sundays in the near by canals, the rivers or the sea. Each adult slave was presented with one pound of salted cod seafood every Sunday by the plantation owner. The salted cod seafood was imported from THE UNITED STATES. A child slave was given a smaller allocation. On special Christian holidays, there is an additional allowance of about a pound of meat or pork, some glucose and a quantity of rum.
Religion
The basic view organised by the plantation owners was that the African slaves didn't hold to a system of beliefs that might be described as a religion (Mbiti 1969). At best - so the associates of the plantocracy and the church that served them felt - their values amounted to nothing more than heathenish superstition. Not a handful of them, perhaps, experienced that the Africans were incapable of religious sentiment. But the Africans held religious beliefs derived from their homeland. It might be useful to remember that a few of the slaves, specifically these who came from the Fula-speaking part of Senegambia, were Muslims. The practice of the planters of separating tribesmen in one another, and of discouraging the assembling of slaves for any purpose whatsoever, was not calculated to permit Islam to endure. Again, the small volume of African Muslims that came to plantations in T&T lacked the management of Imams and the possession of the Qur'an. Then, too, the plantation life did not lend itself for long prayers at preset times, worship on the set in place day, fasting at prescribed durations, or feasting on getaways which didn't coincide with those detected by the plantocracy.
On the other hand, indigenous African religious beliefs, which became labelled as "obeah", survived the difficulties of house life. But these values underwent significant changes although they remained obviously "African" in composition (Saraceni 1996). Three factors were mainly in charge of these changes. In the first place, African spiritual ideas were with the capacity of modification in response to the new situation of real estate life. Subsequently, the practice of African religion was frowned upon by estate specialists. This meant that the faith could only be practised secretly and irregularly. The effect has been that some aspects of African religious techniques withered away while some lost their nationality and language and became garbled. Thirdly, the exposure to Christianity led not and then the change of Blacks to that religion, but also to the overlapping of African and Christian beliefs.
Free Time
Except for cash flow liked by the artisan slaves, almost all of the slaves depended on obtaining money by selling surplus produce off their provision grounds as well as the sale of livestock that they reared. On Sundays, village markets were kept and the slaves seized the possibility to barter or sell their produce. On these events the slaves made purchases of a few pieces of clothing and other items because of their homes.
The Sunday marketplaces were also situations when slaves from different plantations were able to socialise and exchange information and pieces of gossip.
There were also times of recreation. We were holding usually by the end of the "crop" and at Holiday and on open public holidays when the slaves were permitted to hold dances which experienced to end by midnight.
