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“The mere fact that a man could be, under the law, the actual master of the mind and body of human beings had to have disastrous effects. It tended to inflate the ego of most planters beyond all reason.
“They became arrogant, strutting, quarrelsome kinglets; they issued commands; they made laws; they shouted their orders; they expected deference and self-abasement; they were choleric and easily insulted.” WE Du Bois (1935).
Thanks to the masterly work of Selwyn Cudjoe (2018), we have insight into how the enslavers operated. The book, The Slave Master of Trinidad, is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the journey from slavery to Emancipation.
It illustrates well the Du Bois quotation. William Hardin Burnley’s landholding comprised twenty-six hundred acres, and he possessed over two hundred enslaved people. Notably, he initially argued that the enslaved people should not be emancipated, nor should their situation be ameliorated.
He was an early forerunner of Governor Ron DeSantis’ sanitised version of slavery. He believed that slave conditions in Trinidad were superior to those in other islands.
A level of civilisation for the enslaved was only possible “not by the application of restrictive laws, but by a gradual improvement in the feeling, temper, and judgment of the owners of the slaves”.
Positioning himself as an expert on the local situation, he asserted: “We did and do declare the whip to be essential to West Indian discipline; aye, as essential… as the freedom of the press and the trial by jury to the liberty of the subject, in England, and to be justified on equally legitimate grounds.”
He believed that the power of the whip was essential even in the Apprenticeship period and that once it was restricted, “the Negro, though not free, will cease to be of any value to his master”.
“Whipping was not only a method of punishment. It was a conscious device to impress upon the slaves that they were slaves; it was a crucial form of social control…” Rawick (1972).
But it served as a means of achieving the goals of the enslaver. In 1854, the fugitive slave John Brown remembered: “When the price rises in the English market, the poor slaves immediately feel the effects, for they are harder driven, and the whip is kept more constantly going.”
This violence turned our moral perspectives on its head as the enslavers pursued money and wealth. As Cudjoe (2013) reminded: “The whip as a metaphor is very important in Caribbean intellectual thought and Caribbean history.”
Let us consider how we conduct our personal, corporate, and public affairs.
This mindset bore the seeds of Low Road capitalism: the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs and abusing the powerless.
Burnley was not alone in his treatment of the enslaved. In Demerara, in 1823, Reverend John Smith described the enslaved as “being overworked to absolute exhaustion, up to 20 hours a day on the plantations.”
By the end of that year, he was sentenced to death because the planters fabricated a story that he had incited the infamous East Coast Demerara insurrection.
In a recently discovered (2020) account of a slave-owning enterprise in Guyana at that time, it was reported: “Sandbach Tinne’s enslaved Africans were worked to death on their plantations and accounted for in the financial accounts amongst livestock, and when they died, their perceived asset value was written off under the ‘negro account’.”
The death rate on the plantations was high due to overwork, poor nutrition and work conditions, brutality, and disease.
Many plantation owners preferred to import new slaves rather than provide the means and requirements for the survival of their existing enslaved people. This situation informed a heated debate between Burnley and Thomas Foxell Buxton, an abolitionist, about the death toll in the Caribbean.
“The slaves die off like rotten sheep” was how Joseph Marryat, an agent of the colony in London, put it. To contextualise this setting, one must acknowledge that while buying an enslaved person was expensive, their ‘economic output’ was so profitable that taking good care of them did not matter.
An enslaver could rape, mutilate, punish, and even kill the people they had enslaved with impunity. And they did.
There was also the bonus that came at the time of Emancipation. In recent news out of Guyana, the descendants of John Gladstone have apologised for his role in the slave trade, but we should note that he received compensation of £106,769: the equivalent of £83 million today.
Burnley received the equivalent of 40% of that amount. Cudjoe helpfully detailed the machinations that accompanied the compensation decisions in London. The planters looked after their interests: the enslaved received not a penny.
This discussion is not only about history but also about our present. The inequality present and the ability to squeeze every juice out of the system is evidence of the baked-in heritage.
The depressed wages and the spectre of punishment hanging over the heads of our unskilled workers are expressions of this legacy. Union-busting practices and the moaning about the inability to pay a living wage come directly out of the arguments of Burnley in his discussion about the need for better living conditions for the enslaved.
Our private and public sector’s love for gig jobs and job insecurity are part of that playbook. Financial rule-bending, tax evasion, and the corrupting of politicians are our direct heritage from slavery days. May God help us.
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