The Sociology of Slavery. Orlando Patterson

I therefore interpreted the slaveholding class as a proto-Leviathan ruling over a sociological nightmare of doulotic capitalism, brutality, resentment and instability, held together just enough by brute force to produce enormous wealth for a few, the most powerful of whom lived in absentee safety and luxury, the majority biding their time in a system where life remained nasty, brutish and short. There was no better expression of this ruling-class degeneracy than the casualness with which sex, venereal disease and death were viewed, as indicated earlier.

In the absence of any sense of voluntary obligation to obey, resentment and resistance was endemic. Jamaica, in fact, had the highest record of doulotic resistance in the Americas, and possibly in all history, and the last chapter of the work examined this extraordinary record, which I later expanded in a lengthy paper on Jamaican doulotic revolts, one of the two main sequels to The Sociology of Slavery.¹²⁸ It has been said repeatedly that the great Haitian revolt of the enslaved was the first and only successful such revolt in human history. More recently, one of the island’s many doulotic rebellions, known as Tacky’s revolt, has been hailed as the greatest of the island’s many rebellions.¹²⁹ Both these statements are incorrect. As I argued in the work’s final chapter, and at far greater length in my paper on doulotic revolts, the British conquest of Jamaica in 1655 was followed by a long series of interconnected revolts of the enslaved, known collectively as the First Maroon War, that lasted from 1656 until 1739. Collectively, this was, on several occasions, a far greater threat to the Jamaican slave system than Tacky’s revolt. There has been a misguided attempt by some historians to view the First Maroon War as something separate from revolts by the enslaved, especially by Michael Craton, whose work on the subject is a compendium of facts on rebellions in the West Indies with a muddled attempt to explain them,¹³⁰ and even Burnard errs in this assumption, claiming that: ‘In terms of its shock to the imperial system, only the American Revolution surpassed Tacky’s War in the eighteenth century.’¹³¹ My close examination of the record of earlier revolts shows this to be flatly not the case. The Maroon communities were constantly sourced by runaways and rebels from the plantations who were inspired to revolt by their presence, even after their treacherous siding with the whites against future rebellions, as Thistlewood’s entry in his diary of 1st August 1760, in the midst of Tacky’s revolt, makes clear: ‘Dr Miller says the rebels give out they will … fire all the plantations they can, till they force the whites to give them free like Cudjoe’s Negroes.’ [emphasis added]¹³² I document at some length the interaction between the enslaved and the guerrilla encampments. Making a hard and fast distinction between enslaved and Maroon rebellions during this period is as spurious as sharply distinguishing between the Viet Cong guerrilla movement and Ho Chi Minh’s national liberation front in the Vietnamese wars against the French and Americans.¹³³ There is no doubt that these interconnected revolts posed a far greater threat to white rule than Tacky’s revolt ever did. Indeed, the rebels repeatedly forced the whites to abandon plantations in the frontier regions that the planters badly wanted to establish, since land on the southern coast had been completely taken up.¹³⁴ Significantly, in all the reports of the governors writing on the deteriorating situation, and in the frantic deliberations of the Legislature on the crisis, their references were always to ‘the bad success of the parties sent out against the slaves in rebellion’ [emphasis added].¹³⁵ In the end, the slaveholders did something quite remarkable: at the suggestion of the British government they swallowed their pride, sued for peace, and signed a treaty that granted the rebels full sovereignty over their territory as a state within a state. That was victory! It had never happened before in any known pre-existing slave society, although enslavers were to offer terms after this in other slave societies, though nothing as complete and lastingly recognized as this.¹³⁶ Hence it deserves the description as the first successful revolt of the enslaved in history.Tacky’s revolt certainly frightened the whites, but that was all. It never came close to a threat to the system of slavery, and ended in disaster and carnage for the rebels, along with hundreds of innocent enslaved and, as Trevor Burnard recently noted,¹³⁷ was followed immediately by a doubling down by the British slaveholders in their viciousness, as well as the spectacular rise of the 18th-century economy to heights that saw this small island with per capita incomes that far exceeded those of North America. By the 1790s, although Jamaica’s enslaved were well aware of the Haitian revolution, they indicated no signs of following suit (though this was to change during the 19th century), for the simple reason that the proto-Leviathan power of the whites was so overwhelming. As Geggus points out: ‘As always, the brutality and humiliations of bondage had to be weighed against the risks of resistance. In the absence of circumstances realistically favouring rebellion, the enslaved in Jamaica and many other places simply took pride, it seems, in what was happening in the French colony and showed their awareness by what whites everywhere called “insolence”.¹³⁸ Tacky’s revolt was also inconsequential, both in terms of white dread and its consequences, when compared with Jamaica’s other great doulotic revolt, that of the Baptist War led by Daddy Samuel Sharpe in 1831, which had a decisive influence on the British Parliament’s decision to pass the act abolishing slavery, the revolt meticulously examined in Tom Zoellner’s beautifully written recent study.¹³⁹

So, how did the system not only survive this and the other revolts that followed, but thrived to unprecedented heights of economic success throughout the 18th century. One reason for the success of the whites during and after Tacky’s revolt, after coming so close to disaster in the First Maroon War, was one clause in the treaty they signed with Cudjoe, the leader of the rebels, in 1739, who agreed to return all enslaved runaways and aid the colonialists in all future revolts. And they did, starting with Tacky, who was felled by the bullet of a Maroon marksman. Cudjoe’s betrayal had tragic consequences for all future resistance. It was an act of monumental betrayal, a case of snatching treachery from the jaws of heroism. Jamaica’s enslaved continued to rebel throughout the period of slavery at a rate greater than any other known slave system. However, for the entire period of slavery after 1739 the treachery of the Maroons meant that all future revolts were doomed to failure, as were most acts of that other main form of resistance, running away, the Maroons being paid a bounty for returning them.¹⁴⁰ In an admirable paper, Kathleen Wilson has suggested that the Maroons ‘engaged in a double-edge performance of freedom’, in Jamaican slave society.¹⁴¹ By the late 18th century, however, they had ceased to be ambiguous role models for the enslaved. The last and greatest slave revolt would be inspired by secular ideas picked from the discarded newspapers of the enslavers and the spirit of liberation buried in Christianity.¹⁴²

      Behind the Maroon betrayal was an important tactic of the slaveholder proto-Leviathan of which Hobbes would have fully approved: divide and rule, a tactic also emphasized by Goveia.¹⁴³ The colonialists deployed it with devastating effectiveness against the enslaved. They did so in buying and distributing captives from different tribes on the plantations and encouraging their traditional hostilities; in encouraging the division between creole or locally born and those brought from Africa who, from the early 18th century were being contemptuously derided as ‘salt-water-neagas’ and ‘Guinea-birds’ by the creoles; in the division between skilled/elite and gang enslaved; between house slave and field enslaved; between dark skin, sambo skin, mulatto skin, mustee skin, and mustifino near-but-not-quite-there white skin; between men and women; between men and men over women; between women and women over men; between the faithful hoping for favour and freedom who betrayed the rebels plotting revolts running away and poisonings. In his superb recent study, Christer Petley documents how Simon Taylor, the richest planter in Jamaica of his day (the late 1700s) deftly divided the 2248 enslaved on his four plantations and eight pens, balancing one set against another by which means he exercised near perfect control.¹⁴⁴

The system also survived because the enslaved were able to eke out social and cultural spaces in those areas that were irrelevant to the interests of the whites. In the few hours between work and sleep, on the provision grounds where they were made to feed themselves, precariously,¹⁴⁵ and in the Sunday markets, and the saturnalia of Christmas, the enslaved welded from the fragments of African culture, the exegeses of the Caribbean environment, and the scraps of white culture forced upon them, the beginnings of Afro-Jamaican creole culture. Most of The Sociology of Slavery was devoted to