The mid-1820s were a key moment for defenders of colonial slavery. In the wake of abolitionists’s increasingly organized and prominent public attacks, pro-slavery campaigners initiated their own “propaganda campaign” as they sought to resist emancipation or, at the very least, delay and control its imposition. Adopting the playbook of the Anti-Slavery Society, they began to distribute vast numbers of pamphlets, books, tracts, and petitions across the British nation.Footnote 1 Merchant George Saintsbury’s East India Slavery was one of hundreds of similar pro-slavery pamphlets published in the decade preceding emancipation.Footnote 2 Saintsbury was particularly keen to highlight how emancipation would devastate lives in the metropole, especially those of the “dependent widows and orphans, deriving their subsistence from the colonies, but residing in every county and almost every parish throughout England.”Footnote 3 This was far from an unusual rhetorical strategy. Pro-slavery campaigners regularly emphasized the distressing impact emancipation would have on British women and children. In 1826 Jamaican enslaver and member of Parliament Ralph Bernal similarly underscored his concern for the “wives [and] children” who “absolutely depended upon the preservation of that property.”Footnote 4 Even abolitionists were willing to admit that there were “many widows and orphans who are the unconscious stipendiaries of this wicked system and are entirely dependent on the income they derive from it.”Footnote 5 Pro- and anti-slavery campaigners did not merely recognize that women across Britain possessed economic interests in transatlantic enslavement. As the moment of emancipation neared, they deemed them in particular need of financial protection.
The Atlantic world may have been “grounded in gendered notions of authority and control,” but female enslavers were ever-present in the urban and plantation societies of the British Caribbean.Footnote 6 Lucille Mathurin Mair, Hilary Beckles, Cecily Jones, Natalie Zacek, Marisa Fuentes, Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers, Christine Walker, and Misha Ewen are among those who have demonstrated that white women played a central role in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Atlantic world, as traders, retailers, moneylenders, plantation managers, and plantation owners.Footnote 7 These women bought, sold, inherited, and enacted violence on enslaved people, helping to sustain and entrench the system of enslavement and reinforce the boundaries of whiteness that underpinned it.Footnote 8 Christine Walker has suggested that the position of these women as “powerful agents of slavery and colonialism calls into question the extent to which normative European gender ideologies were imported and adopted across the Atlantic.”Footnote 9 But women at the heart of metropolitan Britain acted no less as agents of slavery and colonialism than their colonial counterparts, contesting, manipulating, and reinforcing dominant gender norms in the process. Thus far, however, they have received much less scholarly attention.
Feminist historians have demonstrated unequivocally women’s centrality to the economic worlds of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Britain.Footnote 10 Both single and married women were important economic agents, engaging in commercial and entrepreneurial activities large and small, and in a wide range of industries and trades.Footnote 11 Women were “present and active in financial markets,” making a wide range of investments, including in banks, stock companies, and government bonds.Footnote 12 Female property-ownership was neither unusual nor exceptional, with women owning at least 10 percent of land.Footnote 13 These mainly middle- and upper-class businesswomen, investors, and property-holders, found across the length and breadth of Britain, are exactly the sorts of women who held economic interests in transatlantic enslavement.
This literature has transformed our understanding of women’s contribution to the industrial, financial, and commercial development of British society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But recognizing the significance of women’s economic activity does not mean, as Christine Wiskin has suggested, that men and women undertook economic transactions “on gender neutral lines.”Footnote 14 These women were situated within a patriarchal system that restricted the terms of their engagement. As Catherine Hall has demonstrated, the structures of nineteenth-century capitalism were both predicated upon and reproduced ideas about masculine authority and female dependence.Footnote 15 Although female property-ownership was a key part of this system, patriarchal property relations and inheritance practices primarily “facilitated the transmission of capital across white women’s bodies,” positioning them as conduits rather than as agents and enshrining hierarchies of gender, class, and race.Footnote 16 Legal curtailments, political restraints, and social and cultural expectations served to shape and limit the experiences of all economically active women in early nineteenth-century Britain, although patriarchy was never absolute and its effects were far from uniform.Footnote 17
This article thus seeks to go beyond simply demonstrating the importance of women to the economic life of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, though I certainly take that to be the case. Rather, it will confront how British women negotiated power and patriarchy in the early nineteenth century. Bringing together the historiographies of women and gender in metropolitan Britain and the Atlantic world—not yet in conversation as often as they should be—it will unpick “the unstable presentation of gender identities” that underpinned the endeavors of money-making and property-owning women, and interrogate how these interacted and intersected with other axes of power.Footnote 18 As Shenette Garrett-Scott has noted, it is important to recognize that “as gendered subjects, women can also exercise power that silences and erases.”Footnote 19 In order to understand how British women operated within and sustained nineteenth-century patriarchal capitalism we must interrogate the violence and “taken-for-granted whiteness” that underpinned the endeavors of many economically active women at a time when enslavement and colonialism lay at the heart of the operation of the British economy.Footnote 20
Nowhere is this clearer than in the records of the Slave Compensation Commission. A close reading of the compensation records demonstrates that women played a crucial role in facilitating the transmission of wealth rooted in enslavement into metropolitan society, and that they utilized, manipulated, and were restricted by the financial mechanisms and legal frameworks “through which money from the slavery business became absorbed in the domestic economy.”Footnote 21 Women’s engagement with the compensation process illustrates both the economic opportunities open to middle- and upper-class women in the early nineteenth century and how these were meditated and constrained. But we should not elide the nature of this particular form of money-making. These women were significant players in a violent, brutal, and degrading system that involved exploiting and expropriating the labor of other human beings for their own economic benefit. Their discussions of trusts, annuities, and “West India property” obscured the source of their own wealth and the violence that accompanied it. British women used the enslavement of others to claim, establish, and reinforce their own potentially precarious positions. In a world in which their own opportunities were circumscribed, they used the possession of human “property” to cling onto economic advantages unattainable to those they enslaved.
British Women and Compensation
In 1833, the British government established a new body to administer the payment of the £20 million compensation awarded to enslavers under the Slavery Abolition Act. Over the next decade, the Slave Compensation Commission gathered, assessed, and arbitrated claims from tens and thousands of men and women from across the Atlantic world.Footnote 22 At the heart of this vast bureaucratic undertaking was an attempt to “(re)impose a binary relationship” between enslaver and enslaved “as a matter of legal and economic reality.”Footnote 23 Claimants—or their agents—had to file claims in the colonies, using information from local “slave registers” to support and legitimate them; these claims were then evaluated in Britain, with payments made at the National Debt Office. In 2013, UCL’s Centre for the Legacies of British Slavery published an online database of the 47,000 compensation claimants, providing access to what Nicholas Draper has described a “a unique ‘census’ of slave-ownership” at the moment of emancipation.Footnote 24 This groundbreaking work has helped to transform our understanding of how transatlantic enslavement shaped the social, political, and economic development of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain, facilitating a much more precise and comprehensive understanding of the different ways that slave-ownership shaped British society.Footnote 25 Anyone with internet access can now search for details of the thousands of Britons who claimed, were awarded, or benefited from compensation. Among other criteria, interested parties can search for claimants and awardees by name, address, colony, or parish where they claimed people as property as well as, as I have done, gender.Footnote 26
These search results illustrate that 40.48 percent of the total claimants and beneficiaries of compensation—and 23.03 percent of absentees—were women, demonstrating unequivocally that women played a pivotal role in helping to sustain chattel slavery in the British Caribbean.Footnote 27 Indeed, even these figures likely underplay women’s full involvement in the compensation process.Footnote 28 Whether they were resident in the Caribbean or British-based absentees, these women were more likely to be involved in smaller-scale claims than their male counterparts. But there were nevertheless significant numbers of women operating at the heart of the plantation economy, who claimed vast numbers of men, women, and children as property.Footnote 29 There were 218 women resident in Britain involved in compensation claims for over a hundred people enslaved in the islands of Jamaica and Barbados alone; these women were also the owners and beneficiaries of the estates on which the people they enslaved lived and labored. There were many enslavers of color, male and female, in the nineteenth-century Caribbean.Footnote 30 But as the owners and beneficiaries of substantial sugar plantations, the majority, if not all, of these 218 women are likely to have been white.Footnote 31 As Cecily Jones has shown, white women were crucial to the construction and reproduction of racialized power in the plantation societies of the British Caribbean, and the gendered transmission of property and capital was a key part of this process.Footnote 32 Analyzing these women’s claims in detail illustrates the different ways that female compensation claimants benefited from enslavement, and how they negotiated the financial mechanisms that underpinned patriarchal—and racial—capitalism.
These women were rarely “unconscious stipendiaries.”Footnote 33 Anna Eliza Grenville, the Duchess of Buckingham and Chandos, took a keen interest in her Jamaican plantation. “An attached & honest wife may … be of as much use as a West Indian Attorney” she implored her recalcitrant husband, making clear her opinions on how the family should spend their “W. India Compensation Money.”Footnote 34 Women like Grenville well understood the system they were embroiled in, and how to use the enslavement of others to try and advantage themselves. But that these women were referred to as “stipendiaries” is interesting, both because of how such language served to minimize their involvement in the business of slavery and because it helps us broaden the way we think about “ownership.” Many of these 218 claimants claimed ownership of enslaved people in the strictest legal sense. Others appear in the compensation records as annuitants and legatees, as trust beneficiaries, and as executrixes and trustees. Smaller numbers of women claimed compensation as mortgagees, assignees, guardians, judgment creditors, and administrators. As Draper has highlighted, the forms in which women claimed and were awarded compensation conformed to broader gendered patterns of property-ownership and control.Footnote 35 The records of the Slave Compensation Commission demonstrate both how slave-ownership was transformed “into financial claims and obligations that could be transmitted across and within generations” and the different ways women experienced and negotiated property- and slave-ownership in nineteenth-century Britain.Footnote 36 As the brutality and oppression of Caribbean enslavement was transformed into metropolitan assets, bequests, and annuities, these women were able to distance themselves, physically and conceptually, from the realities of the system from which they benefited. Yet an analysis of the compensation records demonstrates the extent to which British women’s attempts to ensure financial security for themselves and their kin were enmeshed with the global systems of empire and enslavement, and the racial violence on which this depended.
The archive of slavery both embodies and reproduces the violence enacted on Black men, women, and children.Footnote 37 As Marisa Fuentes has shown, the violence of enslavement was—and is—“transferred from the enslaved bodies to the documents that count, condemn, assess, and evoke them.” As historians “we receive them in this condition.”Footnote 38 This is nowhere more evident than in the compensation records and wills that underpin this article, documents that very literally objectified the people they reduced to “property.” The frequent references to “property in Jamaica” and “West India estates” depended on and reaffirmed the erasure of enslaved people as historical subjects.Footnote 39 Although inspired by Black feminist scholarship on the archive of slavery, I am not, like Fuentes or Saidiya Hartman, seeking to use compensation and probate records “for contrary purposes,” eking out the “extinguished and invisible but no less historically important lives” of the enslaved.Footnote 40 Rather, I hope to “mak[e] visible” the process by which British women claimed enslaved people as property and how they used this racialized violence to negotiate and wield power in a patriarchal society.Footnote 41 Foregrounding the violence that underpinned the women’s compensation claims, whether as owners, trust beneficiaries, or annuitants, demonstrates the importance of critically interrogating women’s property-ownership and wealth-holding in nineteenth-century Britain, and the archival silences that underpin how we write this history.
Owners
Those who claimed compensation as “owners in fee” were ostensibly those with the most power and authority over the men, women, and children they enslaved. Unsurprisingly, as the common law principle of coverture made it difficult for married women to own property, most women who claimed compensation as absolute owners of those they enslaved were widowed or had never married. They tended to have inherited their Caribbean estates, and the people they claimed as property, from family members. Margaret Ann Simpson was one of a number of women who inherited from their late husbands. But both widowed and unmarried women inherited from a range of other family members: brothers and uncles, fathers and mothers. Mary Ann Peterkin inherited Jamaica’s Chatham plantation, and the 144 people enslaved upon it, from her brother; she married shortly afterwards. The never-married Wilhelmina Barbara Traill, on the other hand, inherited the Salters plantation in Barbados from her adopted mother, Mary Salter Dehany.Footnote 42 As Susan Staves has observed, one of the key features of the patriarchal structures that underpinned the British economy was that “women functioned to transmit wealth from one generation to other,” usually “from one generation of men” to the next.Footnote 43 But these women were not simply passive transmitters of familial property and wealth—as Dehany’s example illustrates. Dehany, the sole heiress of her father, had been due to marry John Sinclair, 11th Earl of Caithness, before the latter died by suicide. “Thrown into the deepest distress by this sad event,” she refused any future suitors, instead adopting Traill, Sinclair’s niece, and promising “to bequeath her … [her] fortune.”Footnote 44 When Dehany died in 1832, Traill inherited all her real and personal property, “in any part of Great Britain in Jamaica or Barbadoes,” including Salters and the 205 people enslaved on it.Footnote 45 Presenting themselves as owners of land rather than people was a representational strategy frequently used by absentee enslavers, male and female, enabling them to legitimate their ownership of enslaved “property” while obscuring the humanity of those like Rachael, Peggy, and Margaret, all born into Dehany’s possession around 1830.Footnote 46
These women sometimes inherited because of an absence of male descendants. The unmarried Yorkshire enslaver Anne Sill inherited both the Providence estate in Jamaica—and the people she claimed as property enslaved upon it—and land in Dent, Yorkshire, after the death of her father and three brothers.Footnote 47 But the existence of male relatives did not necessarily preclude women from appearing as compensation claimants. Some, particularly women, chose to privilege other women, illustrative of how “female economies of financial support” helped to protect some women from economic vulnerability.Footnote 48 Southampton-based Ann Newell left her married daughter Ann Launce Hill a life interest in her Jamaican plantation “and the Slaves thereon.” In her will Newell also manumitted an enslaved woman named Kitty Hull, providing her with an annuity of £10, indicating the clear hierarchies of protection that underpinned women’s support networks.Footnote 49 Many others adopted some form of partible inheritance, a practice increasingly used by those who desired more flexibility in their inheritance strategies.Footnote 50 A number of women claimed compensation as part of a small group of siblings or family members, both male and female, and mostly on at least equal terms. Jamaican enslaver David Bernard left his wife Judith “Twenty house negroes” and a life interest in a pen—a livestock farm—named Bona Vista, as well as an annuity of £500. He then bequeathed his eldest son a legacy of £1,000. However, the residue of his estate, including the rest of his “property” in people, was given “to all my children including the one now expected to be born in this year, share and share alike.”Footnote 51 The compensation for David Bernard’s portion of the Eden Estate was split between both his wife, who received the largest portion, and his three surviving children, both male and female.Footnote 52
These enslavers did not just profit significantly from the compensation; their wills illustrate that Caribbean estates continued to be an important part of these women’s wider property portfolios beyond the moment of emancipation. Wills of both widowed and never married women hint at an active and longstanding involvement in perpetuating, entrenching, and profiting from enslavement, whether through the transatlantic management of their plantations, or because they had spent time in the Caribbean themselves. Anne Launce Hill bequeathed £100 to Joseph Brough, “my Attorney residing on … the Hermitage Estate in the parish of Portland,” suggesting that she had a close working relationship with him.Footnote 53 The never-married Catherine Wordie similarly left £15 to “Mary Amos a free Mulatto Woman” living in the Jamaican parish of St Anne in her 1833 will; the precise relationship between Wordie and Amos remained unspoken.Footnote 54 Seamlessly integrated into metropolitan inheritance strategies—a process that could often render them invisible—the inter-generational transmission of wealth and property rooted in enslavement enabled these women to provide financial support for family and friends. Wordie added a codicil to her will in 1837 “in consequence of the emancipation of the negroes in the West Indies and the compensation being paid in England,” leaving a legacy of £1,000 to Elizabeth Finlay, a woman she had described in the 1833 original as “my friend … now residing with me.”Footnote 55 The will of Mary Chandler, who died in 1833, stated specifically that a sum of “about £20,000” invested in 3 percent consolidated bank annuities in the Bank of England had “been purchased with money arising from the produce of … [my] … West India Estates.” She ordered this money be split equally between an uncle, two aunts, and her cousin Sarah “for her sole and separate use.”Footnote 56
These women adopted a wide variety of bequeathing practices. Yorkshire-born “spinster” Ann Sill was one of several women who placed “all other my Real Estate in the said Island of Jamaica” in trust to be sold as “soon as conveniently may be after my decease”; by the 1830s many saw selling Jamaican plantations as financially preferable to retaining them. She ordered that the money arising from this sale be split between fourteen Yorkshire-based friends and relations, including orphan turned proprietor Richard Sutton, allegedly the inspiration behind Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff.Footnote 57 Although, as was common practice among women, these enslavers’s wills were often relatively “personalist,” bequeathing legacies to a wide range of friends and kin, these women frequently privileged female relatives or friends.Footnote 58 Mary Gilpin ordered that the profits from the sale of “my said property of Cascade” should be invested in securities to be paid to her daughters Mary James and Laura Gilpin for the rest of their lives provided they remained unmarried. Only if they wed would the securities instead be split between a larger range of relatives, the capital from their Jamaican estate facilitating her daughters’s financial independence.Footnote 59 Other women protected female family members by providing them with a “sole and separate estate” that preserved a woman’s interest in specific property during her marriage. Mary Sandby insisted that the £1,000 reduced bank annuities she left for her sister were “to be transferred in her name to & for her own use and benefit free from the debts control or engagements of her present or any future husband.”Footnote 60 Women across metropolitan Britain sought to use wealth and property rooted in enslavement to provide financial support for female kin in an economically uncertain world.
However, many of the women who claimed compensation as “owners in fee” did not actually possess this “property” absolutely. A significant number of the women who claimed compensation as enslavers only possessed life interests in their Jamaican and Barbadian estates and enslaved “property,” which had been put in trust by others. Although they enjoyed the profits from these plantations, they did not have the power to sell or bequeath them; these trusts were designed to provide women with financial support but not control. In his will, Sarah Gray’s husband directed that the “the rest residue and remainder of my Estates” were to be used for his wife’s maintenance and support during her life but thereafter were to descend to his nephews.Footnote 61 We might then expect Patrick Gray’s various trustees to have claimed compensation on behalf of his various beneficiaries. But Sarah Gray claimed, and was awarded, compensation as sole owner and awardee, receiving over £5,000 for 304 people enslaved on the ironically named Friendship plantation. Ann Launce Hill similarly inherited her Jamaican estate, and the people enslaved upon it, in trust, this time from her mother. Claiming compensation as owner-in-fee, she was awarded the full £3,500 in compensation for those enslaved on the Hermitage estate, despite ostensibly only possessing a life interest in the plantation.Footnote 62 It is also clear that Hill very much conceived of herself as owner of the property. She undertook the transatlantic management of the plantation, and referred to an attorney working on “my estate called the Hermitage.”Footnote 63 As with other forms of property-ownership, how women experienced and understood slave-ownership was not always coterminous with their legal rights.Footnote 64 For women like Gray and Hill, claiming ownership of other human beings could hold both a material and symbolic importance that did not necessarily reflect their legal entitlements. This not only helped them assure their financial security but reinforced particular kinds of—classed and racialized—identities, and even secured posthumous reputations; in her will, Hill left £500 to be invested for the upkeep and “ornamental repair” of her Southampton tomb and the relief of “distressed objects” in the parishes of St Mary and Holy Rood.Footnote 65
Trust Beneficiaries
Although originally created to protect landed estates, by the early nineteenth century, trusts had become widely used by the growing middle classes; in 1857 Attorney General Richard Bethel described the trust as “one of the most ordinary relations of life … among the most common and the most necessary.”Footnote 66 While established by and for both men and women, trusts played a particularly important role in protecting women’s proprietorship. Preserving a woman’s “sole and separate estate” helped to ensure property bequeathed to her by her family remained intact, ensuring it could not be used to pay off a husband’s debts or be lost in the case of his bankruptcy. This provided married women with an important element of financial independence and some access to property. Yet they also served to offer control over women’s assets; their terms could be very restrictive. If women might have received the profits from properties held in trust, they only possessed circumscribed powers over them. Only rarely were women given property held in trust absolutely or provided with the power to bequeath it as they might have wished.Footnote 67 Primarily concerned with protecting the transmission of wealth and property across generations, trusts reinforced the—usually, but not exclusively, male—authority of those who established them. Female trust beneficiaries certainly profited from compensation, but they did so directly, through the figure of the trustee, again almost always male.
The trusts underpinning compensation claims were established for a range of purposes and in a wide variety of ways: in wills, in marriage settlements, and occasionally by the commissioners themselves. In at least one instance a trust was established explicitly to mitigate the effects of coverture. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was put in place by a woman, Priscilla Franks, a widow who had inherited from her father. When Franks died in 1832, she put “all other my real estate,” including land in Britain as well as estates and people she claimed as property in Jamaica, in trust for her niece, Lady Isabella Cooper. While Cooper was “to have receive and take the rents issues and profits” of her estates, it was trustees Robert Pitches and Henry Allen Johnson who were in ultimate control and it was they who were awarded £6,379 12s 5d in compensation for the enslaved on Duckenfield Hall plantation.Footnote 68 The trust established by Franks, however, was much less restrictive than most. The trustees had permission to sell, dispose of, convey, or transfer any part of the property if directed by Cooper and were instructed to devise the property to her forever for her sole “use and benefit” should her husband die.Footnote 69 The correspondence between Cooper and trustee Robert Pitches indicates that she was regularly sent updates about both her Caribbean estates and the compensation process, and was expected to respond with her own instructions. Pitches immediately notified Cooper when he received £1,132 3s 10d “for your share of the compensation money” for one of her estates, adding “I shall be happy to receive your directions accordingly.”Footnote 70 Franks recognized the necessity of protecting Cooper’s “property” from the interference of her husband or his possible bankruptcy, providing her with some economic independence. There is no evidence of either woman expressing concern for the men, women, and children on whom this independence depended.
Other trusts also served to ensure female dependents were provided for, albeit in ways that were more circumscribed. John Shickle bequeathed the remainder of his estate Shickle’s Pen to his wife Ann Shickle “for her natural life,” directing that after her death it be divided equally between his two daughters.Footnote 71 The Commissioners of Compensation established a trust for Shickle’s benefit, ordering the trustees to lay out £1,127 16s 4d—half of the compensation for Shickle’s Pen—in 3 percent Consolidated Bank Annuities, paying the annual dividends to Ann Shickle for the rest of her life.Footnote 72 These trusts often contained explicit restrictions about limiting women’s access to property and assets under particular conditions, fixing them in the role of widow and wife. In his will Spencer Thomas Vassall established a trust in which he left his wife Catherine “the surplus interest or yearly produce” of “of all my said property” in both Britain and Jamaica during her life, as well as a legacy of £800 “provided she shall remain unmarried.” In the event of Catherine’s remarriage, Vassall stipulated that “only one half or moiety of the said yearly income interest or produce of my said property shall be paid to my said wife during her life,” with the other half being put toward the maintenance of his children.Footnote 73 She did indeed remarry, which explains why the then Catherine Chetham Strode appears alongside her son Spencer Lambert Hunter Vassall and other family members in the compensation records.Footnote 74 Although both men and women established trusts in order to provide financial support for family members, women were much more likely to be affected by stipulations directing and controlling how they interacted with their “property.” For widows in particular, benefiting from trusts often depended upon conforming to a carefully proscribed social role.Footnote 75
Finally, several of the trusts underpinning compensation claims were fundamentally primogenital, aiming to establish an entail that privileged the male line of descent. This was a common practice among the largest Jamaican landholders; aping the dynastic ambitions of the British aristocracy, they sought to protect both their Caribbean and metropolitan estates from dissolution, so as to preserve and enhance their power and authority.Footnote 76 The 1814 will of Irish and Jamaican landowner John Scott reflected and reinscribed the gender—and racial—hierarchies in which this power was rooted. He ordered that “all my Jamaican property, land, slaves and all else there” be placed in trust for the use of his eldest son, John James Scott, and “his legitimate male heirs.” As was customary, he provided his wife Elizabeth Favell Scott with an annuity of £800 secured on these estates; he also made her one of the guardians of their children and covered the payments for their education and maintenance.Footnote 77 The will codified Favell Scott’s position as a “reproducer of freedom”: dependent but integral to the reproduction, maintenance, and care of the (white) family, from which his eight “reputed children” and their mothers—each provided with annuities of between £25 and £50—were firmly excluded.Footnote 78 Twenty years later, Favell Scott was named in the compensation records as a beneficiary of the £2,501 16s 11d successfully claimed by trustees for 322 people enslaved on the family’s two Jamaican plantations.Footnote 79
Although all the trusts underpinning compensation claims were fundamentally concerned with protecting property, how women benefited from them varied significantly. As Aston has noted, women could themselves be the architects of economic strategies that underpinned the transmission of property, ensuring the financial security of loved ones and strengthening familial and affective bonds.Footnote 80 The trust Priscilla Franks established for her niece Lady Cooper provided the latter with significant financial independence, enabling her to enjoy the profits of enslavement free from the interference of her husband. But trusts were more likely to contain provisions that reinforced female dependency. The beneficiaries of these trusts lived no less off the labor of other human beings, but their access to this wealth—including compensation payments—was circumscribed, both reflecting and reinforcing their delineated position within the family. Trusts could variously, sometimes even simultaneously, liberate, protect, and constrain.
Annuitants
Annuities were an obviously gendered form of property-ownership, a “classic form of income for the dependent,” whether a servant, child, or, most commonly, wife.Footnote 81 Like Elizabeth Favell Scott, many British women received annuities secured on Jamaican or Barbadian plantations, “the purest expression of the extraction of wealth from the labor of the enslaved.”Footnote 82 Upon his death in 1826 London merchant John Higgin left his wife Mary an annuity of £800 to be paid from his Jamaican estates “in gratitude for her virtuous deportment and unbarring love and attachment,” the stipend presented as a reward for Mary Higgin’s conformity to appropriate standards of feminine behavior.Footnote 83 Eleven years later, she was awarded £3,867 11s 10d in compensation for 193 people enslaved on the Great Pond Estate.Footnote 84 Male enslavers frequently established annuities in their wills, (re)producing and extending dependence on enslavement across the metropole. Draper has suggested that in the 1820s they represented around 10 percent of the total wealth transmitted to British enslavers. Footnote 85 Annuities were seen as stable, secure sources of income, enabling husbands to ensure that their wives were provided for, while also exerting their control from beyond the grave.
It initially seems surprising that so many annuitants claimed, and were awarded, compensation; we might expect trustees or executors to have claimed on their behalf. Sometimes, as with Eliza Elmslie, these women were themselves executors of wills in which they received an annuity. Elmslie was one of three executors and trustees responsible for managing her late husband’s “estates and property in Jamaica.”Footnote 86 Often, however, annuitants claimed compensation because their annuity was in arrears, likely because the estates on which annuities had been secured had become indebted or were not able to satisfy bequests made potentially decades earlier. Elizabeth Pinnock never received any of the £1,200 annually provided for her in her late husband’s will. She submitted a counterclaim to the Slave Compensation Commission, claiming compensation “in part discharge” of the £17,100 due to her in arrears and was awarded the large majority of the over £6,000 awarded in compensation for the 322 men, women, and children enslaved on Jamaica’s Old and New Pera estates.Footnote 87 Her claim contained the details and prescribed values of those enslaved upon the plantations, including fifteen “head people,” eighty “inferior field labourers,” and fifty-one “children under six years of age,” valued respectively at £1,216, £2,800, and £714: a stark reminder of the human cost that underpinned women’s attempts to claim the financial obligations due to them.Footnote 88 Pinnock was far from the only woman awarded compensation because their annuity was in arrears. Scottish enslaver John Graham marked his attachment to his “beloved wife” Matilda by providing her with an annuity of £800 a year.Footnote 89 But this annuity was never paid. The £3,189 6s 0d compensation for 170 people enslaved on Jamaica’s Three Mile Estate was awarded to Matilda Graham based on this unpaid annuity, which by 1839 had risen to almost £8,000.Footnote 90
Annuities are frequently seen as a “passive” form of property-ownership, the beneficiary having little control or decision-making power over their assets.Footnote 91 These annuitants were the supposed “unconscious stipendiaries” that even abolitionists shared concern for. But annuities, particularly those secured on Caribbean plantations, were not always a secure source of income. Far from “unconscious stipendiaries,” the women who claimed compensation as annuitants were actively involved in the process. Understanding they were in a potentially vulnerable economic position, these women were determined to claim the money that they felt was rightfully theirs. Indeed, for the women whose annuities were in arrears, compensation meant that enslavement actually became more profitable at the point of emancipation. Looking at women who claimed compensation as annuitants—just as with owners and trust beneficiaries—illustrates both the tensions that property-owning women frequently faced in nineteenth-century Britain, and women’s centrality to the social, familial, and financial networks that underpinned the operation of British slave-ownership. Operating within a patriarchal system that left them facing a range of social, legal, and economic disadvantages, they used the possession of enslaved “property” for their own economic protection and benefit.
Married Women’s Claims to Compensation
It is no coincidence that most of the women discussed thus far were widowed or unmarried; coverture had a significant impact on married women’s (in)ability to own and access property in Britain. Yet although ideologically powerful, the principle of coverture was never all-encompassing and in practice its implementation was fragmentary. As illustrated, the system of equity could alleviate the severity of the common law. Propertied married women, often aided by men, frequently challenged, undermined, and eluded the constraints of coverture. This was not unusual, exceptional, or deemed subversive. Married women were central to the operation of metropolitan, colonial, and transatlantic societies and economies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.Footnote 92 That does not necessarily mean, however, that, as Allyson M. Poska has suggested, “rigid patriarchal ideologies [were] incompatible with the realities of daily life.”Footnote 93 Placing so much emphasis on the gap between legal codes and lived reality risks underestimating the very power of coverture.Footnote 94 Adopting an approach that overemphasizes either the overarching impact of coverture or wives’s legal and economic agency is to reinforce a false dichotomy. As Lindsay R. Moore has suggested, married women’s legal position was “Janus-faced”—and, of course, always bound up with a wide range of other hierarchies of power.Footnote 95
Married women appear inconsistently in the records of the Slave Compensation Commission. Some wives were awarded compensation independently of their husbands. Alongside her two sisters, Emily Mary Markham (née Packharnis) was awarded £2,194 8s 3d for 104 people enslaved on the Carton Estate in the Jamaican parish of St Ann.Footnote 96 Markham’s sister, the widow Frances Cox, successfully applied to the commissioners “on behalf of herself and her two sisters, Eliza Mary Markham and Sarah Anna Parkinson, as joint owners-in-fee,” making no mention of Markham’s husband, Charles.Footnote 97 Much more commonly, married women claimed compensation alongside their husbands. “William Dawson and Letitia his Wife” submitted a counterclaim as devisees of part of the Sportsmans Estate in Trelawney, Jamaica; Letitia Dawson and her sister had inherited the plantation “for their own use and benefit independent of the … debts or engagements of their respective husbands” after the death of their brother on the condition they manumit two enslaved women, Elory (or Eliza) Dennis Brown and Flora (or Catherine) Brown.Footnote 98 William and Letitia Dawson were subsequently awarded £1,173 10s 2d for their share of the compensation for the 116 people enslaved on Sportmans Estate, the other half being awarded to the other sister, Helen Brown.Footnote 99
This was far from unusual. Lady Lillias Oswald, Jane Fitzgerald, and Helen Mackeller were among the other married women named alongside their husbands in compensation claims or awards, all having brought enslaved “property” to their marriages.Footnote 100 In other instances married women appear in the compensation records more obliquely, while still being listed as co-claimants. “William David Longlands and Uxor, George Ingram Fisher and Uxor, John Mckenzie and Uxor, and Mary Pendrill” collectively claimed compensation for 342 people enslaved on Hanover’s New Miln’s Estate, this language simultaneously rendering these women visible and invisible. Sisters Judith Campbell Longlands, Elizabeth Fisher, and Margaret Campbell McKenzie, were, along with Pendrill, heirs of their maternal grandfather William Campbell. Yet their identities were reduced merely to the status of wife, their presence primarily serving to signal the rights to property-ownership acquired by their husbands. Indeed, a note attached to the claim simply stated “Married women, stand over.”Footnote 101 That so many wives claimed and were awarded compensation alongside their husbands highlights both the potency and the ambiguity of coverture. Certainly, it illustrates that the legal power of coverture was never all-encompassing. Marriage did not necessarily mean men were given carte blanche over their wives’s property. Yet it also difficult to discern the impact of this. It is not clear who received the compensation money, whether these married women had any control over money they were awarded, or whether the fact that they nominally appeared as awardees was irrelevant. Much perhaps depended on the economic agreements upon which each marriage rested.
Occasionally the compensation records offer a glimpse into the marital tensions and conflicts that could underpin joint compensation awards. Francis Glasse submitted a counterclaim for compensation for 112 people enslaved on Jamaica’s Java estate, as an annuitant under the will of his brother-in-law William Stimpson.Footnote 102 Stimpson had bequeathed Java to his nephew Francis Philip Glasse, the son of Francis Glasse and wife Eliza, as well as providing an annuity of £100 for his sister “for her separate use.”Footnote 103 The younger Glasse died in 1834, leaving the plantation to his “beloved mother” for her use for the rest of her life.Footnote 104 Eliza Glasse wrote to the commissioners, explaining the situation and voicing her concerns that, “being a divided family,” the claim could “be settled only by the Chancellor.”Footnote 105 The compensation was ultimately awarded, rather ambiguously, to “Francis Glasse and Eliza Glasse.”Footnote 106 It is unclear what the financial implications of this were to either partner, though Francis’s at least partly successful attempt to access his wife’s inheritance illustrates how coverture often “remained … available to be called upon” when the interests of husband and wife diverged or marriages broke down.Footnote 107
Husbands’s ability to claim compensation “in right of wife” illustrates the simultaneous power and flexibility of coverture. Despite insisting in 1826 that he had “always had a great objection to possess[ing] … slaves,” member of Parliament and parliamentary agent for Jamaica William Burge was one of a significant number of men who claimed compensation this way, successfully submitting a claim for £97 7s 11d for four people enslaved in Jamaica as “owner, and in right of [his] wife,” Helen.Footnote 108 But married men could only claim compensation in this way for claims under £200.Footnote 109 All claims submitted “in right of wife” above £200 needed to contain certified evidence of “the consent of the latter to an award being made in her Husband’s favour.”Footnote 110 While we might question whether such consent could always be given freely, the mechanisms of the Commission do appear to have provided financial protection to some married women. Transatlantic merchant Robert Johnston initially attempted to claim compensation for 120 people enslaved in the Jamaican parish of St Ann as owner “in right of wife,” but his claim was rejected. The compensation was instead awarded to the most recent trustees of his marriage settlement, likely providing his wife, Catherine Cole Johnston, with some financial autonomy. An 1826 resettlement had placed the remaining unsold estate of Catherine’s late father John in trust benefit “to and for [Catherine’s] own sole and separate use and benefit independent of the said Robert Johnston her husband.” This included “all and singular the negro and other slaves” on the property, “together with their future offspring and increases of the females of the said slaves.”Footnote 111 Cole Johnston’s own financial security was predicated on the reproductive potential of the people she claimed as property and the continued exploitation of other women’s bodies.Footnote 112
“Neither marginal nor exceptional,” the compensation records demonstrate that married women were crucial linchpins in the complex kinship networks that helped build and maintain chattel enslavement in the Atlantic world.Footnote 113 As recent scholarship on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century wives has made clear, coverture was not monolithic and there was no “homogenous experience” for propertied married women.Footnote 114 Married women sometimes claimed compensation independently of their husbands, and frequently did so alongside them, while they also benefited from trusts and marriage settlements, circumscribed though they might have been. Occasionally they were awarded compensation as representatives of their husbands. Emma Reignolds and her brother-in-law were together awarded a small part of the compensation for people enslaved on the Hyde Estate in Jamaica; at the time her husband was imprisoned as an insolvent debtor.Footnote 115 This is not to suggest the impact of coverture and marriage was unimportant. The capacity for husbands to claim compensation “in right of wife” certainly prevented some married women from exercising financial autonomy; the commissioners’s requirement for the consent of wives for claims over £200 offered some protection, but is difficult to know how this affected the women concerned. It is likely that some women chose to prioritize the familial unit over their economic independence. Anna Eliza Grenville, first Duchess of Buckingham and Chandos, explained to her husband that although she “had a right to give in” a claim for the compensation for those enslaved on Hope estate, she “would not do that or even allude to it” for the benefit of the family.Footnote 116 To see claiming compensation as merely as “a straightforward expression of agency or a resistance of patriarchy” is to flatten and “obscure the complexity of” these women’s goals and motivations.Footnote 117 The married women who did claim compensation, like their unmarried counterparts, may have occasionally sought to challenge the patriarchal systems in which they operated, but they were far more likely to uphold them or find a way to operate within their bounds.Footnote 118 After all, their negotiation of their own positions within this system was predicated on the oppression and exploitation of others, on the brutal and violent enslavement of other human beings. It is only by looking closely at one enslaver’s engagement with the Slave Compensation Commission that we can begin to see how British women “operated consciously and instrumentally,” using enslavement and the compensation process to try and reinforce their own potentially uncertain economic positions.
Dorothy Little
In September 1833 Dorothy Little, a seventy-year-old widow living in Clifton near Bristol, wrote a furious letter to Lord Stanley, the colonial secretary. “It is quite inconsistent with the character of the noble Englishman to reduce aged widows to beggary by forcibly taking their property from them,” she admonished.Footnote 119 An enslaver of thirteen men, women, and children in Jamaica, Little was well-recompensed as part of the emancipation process, receiving £297 13s 6d in compensation.Footnote 120 However, she did not believe this was enough. As she made clear in a separate petition she submitted to the House of Lords, she was particularly concerned about the fact that she did not own any land in Jamaica, and thus would not receive any income after emancipation: “Your Petitioner … believes that there are many in her situation, but they are principally Widows and Orphans.”Footnote 121 Dorothy Little was one of many women who wrote to the Slave Compensation Commission, though few others were quite so persistent in their efforts to try and get what they felt they deserved. Little’s extensive correspondence with commissioners and politicians thus offers a fascinating insight into the ways women negotiated and exercised gendered—and racialized—power in early nineteenth-century Britain.
Little was in frequent contact with the Commission between 1833 and 1835. Although previously resident in Jamaica, she had lived in the UK since her husband’s death in 1802 and with “no relation or friend now in the island who I can flatter myself will feel great interest in my welfare,” entreated upon the commissioners herself.Footnote 122 Well informed and strong-willed, Little was determined to find influential men to help fight her corner; she was furious that, having with “greatest attention read every debate in the House of Commons on the West India question,” she “had not yet seen my case mentioned by any one Member of Parliament.”Footnote 123 She repeatedly highlighted the injustice she felt as an enslaver without land or other property. Highlighting that her only income was from the enslaved people she had been left by her husband, she explained that she had been living on this rental income of about £80 per annum for the last thirty years. With no hint of irony, she bemoaned that now “this rent is to be taken from me, without my leave or consent, and without my receiving any amends at all worth mentioning.”Footnote 124 She was very conscious of the impact of emancipation on her personal finances, calculating that the compensation she expected when “my negroes will be taken from me” was likely to provide her with a return of £12 a year (although not stated, this assumed reinvestment of the compensation money in government securities, a common form of investment for women).Footnote 125 “Is it possible I can live on such a pittance, or submit to the loss of seven eights of my income,” she lamented.Footnote 126 Those she enslaved, of course, received nothing.
Little deliberately and repeatedly emphasized her position as an elderly widow, presenting herself as vulnerable and in need of protection. She made it clear that she believed the proper role of the “noble Englishman” was to provide for the women and children who relied on him for support. “[I] look to you, Sir, or his Majesty’s government,” Little implored Lord Stanley, to “provide an asylum for me and others in my situation.”Footnote 127 Claiming that without additional support she would be “reduced almost to Beggary,” Little emphasized that at her “advanced age” this was her “whole means of subsistence,” without which she would starve; “my existence depends on the rent of those few negroes,” she insisted.Footnote 128 Such rhetorical strategies—no doubt underpinned by very real anxieties—were not unusual among female compensation claimants. Mary M. Sutherland, who received a £200 annuity secured on an estate in St Vincent, similarly appealed to the “humane consideration” of the commissioners, claiming that without this sum she had “no other prospect than positive starvation.”Footnote 129 Highlighting their vulnerability and helplessness, these women tapped into and utilized gendered ideas about dependence that structured property-ownership and transmission, and which positioned (white, middle-class) women as “designed … for a state of dependence and consequently of submission.”Footnote 130 They drew upon and manipulated dominant gender ideals in order to achieve their ends, deploying an “almost theatrical feminine inferiority” that, as Amanda Vickey has shown, frequently characterized women’s petitions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.Footnote 131
Their ends, of course, were to receive money in compensation for the loss of people they claimed as property. In her correspondence Little constructed her sense of self not only in opposition to the independent “noble Englishman” but to the unnamed women she enslaved. She voiced her concerns that her “unattached field labourers” would be registered by the authorities as “inferior”—and thus she would receive less compensation for them—“for out of the whole number (14) 10 of them are females.” In perhaps the most chilling sentence in her entire correspondence, she stated that these women had actually “been more valuable to me than if they had been strong men, for they have more than doubled their original number, and of course doubled my income.”Footnote 132 This relatively offhand comment to the commissioners illustrates how the reproductive capacity of enslaved women lay, both symbolically and very literally, at the heart of the system of chattel slavery; it was their transformation into “generative forms of capital” that made these women so “valuable” to Little.Footnote 133 But it also shows how white women’s articulation of gendered identity was central to this process. As Marisa Fuentes has demonstrated, positioning enslaved women as “genderless” was key to (white) female enslavers’ articulation of gendered and racialized authority. Drawing on the work of Hortense Spillers, she argues that gender, family, and motherhood were seen as “a privilege of the dominant (white) class” that was actively stripped from enslaved women through their commodification.Footnote 134 The enslaved mother was “simultaneously made impossible … and crucial.”Footnote 135 In quantifying the fertility of the unnamed women she claimed as property, Little reduced them to commodities—and bodies that reproduced commodities. In doing so, she sought to strip them of both their humanity and femininity. She did not deem these women to be in need of protection.
Underpinning the very principle of compensation, a principle accepted by almost all within British society, was the nation-state’s legitimization of enslavement and the reduction of enslaved Africans to transposable units of economic value. The compensation records, and the registers of the enslaved on which compensation calculations were based, reproduce the literal objectification of those enslaved by Little, actively erasing and obscuring the voices, thoughts, fears, hopes, and dreams of those they recorded. But, as Stephanie Smallwood has highlighted, although accounts like these may “strain toward the illusion of disinterested transparency,” ultimately they can never attain this goal or entirely repress “the counter-history [they] seek … to disavow.”Footnote 136 Recognizing that a register is merely one story told enables us to “excavate hauntings” and imagine how Sally (40), Lucy (38), Betty (38), Nancy (35), Mary (16), John (15), Hannah (13), and Dehany (2½) —all listed on the 1817 Jamaican register as “in the possession of Eliza Mary Tharp as agent to Mrs Dorothy”—might have understood, struggled against, and refused their commodification.Footnote 137
By “privileging the interrogative over the declarative” we might ask: how did Hannah feel about later giving birth to George and William, births that helped Little to “double her income”?Footnote 138 While she could not escape a system that commodified both her own body and the children she bore, did choosing to give birth at home or prolonging breastfeeding—as many enslaved women did—help Hannah to define motherhood in her own way?Footnote 139 How might we best understand Mary’s apparent childlessness? Perhaps, as was far from unusual, poor diet, high rates of disease, and the horrific conditions under which she labored meant that, despite her owner’s—and maybe her own—desires, she was unable to have children? Or perhaps she, like the women Janet Schaw observed in Antigua and St Kitts, possessed “certain herbs and medicines, that free[d] them from such an incumbrance”? Footnote 140 Under the conditions of chattel slavery the use of contraceptives and abortifacients was a political act; controlling fertility was part of the “oppositional consciousness” of enslaved women who resisted attempts by those like Little to reduce them to nothing more than “breeders.”Footnote 141 We cannot escape the violence of either the registers or the compensation records, which reduced fellow human beings to profitable objects to be bought, sold, or hired out, and then bequeathed and profited from.Footnote 142 But such questions encourage us to reflect on how enslavement “always burst beyond the containment of the ledger” or the compensation record, foregrounding the humanity that men and women like Little tried very hard to, but ultimately could never, deny.Footnote 143
Conclusion
Female enslavers were not unusual or exceptional. Women played a pivotal role in helping to sustain and entrench the system of enslavement in the Atlantic world and to reinforce the boundaries of whiteness that underpinned it.Footnote 144 But although most scholarship on female slave-ownership has focused on the Caribbean or the United States, there were many female enslavers living in the heart of the metropole. Dorothy Little was one of many British women whose property interests included those in people. These women played a crucial role in bringing slave-ownership “home” to Britain, facilitating the transmission of wealth rooted in enslavement into metropolitan society. Of course, they were not only enslavers; they were also mothers and daughters, wives and widows, investors and businesswomen, and, frequently, the owners of metropolitan property. These were the same kinds of women—indeed often the very same women—whose metropolitan investments, property-holding, and entrepreneurship gave them a “central place” in the urban and rural economies of nineteenth-century Britain.Footnote 145 “West India property,” a nebulous phrase that conceals far more than it reveals, was seamlessly integrated into metropolitan forms of property-ownership, wealth holding, and inheritance, including for women.
This does not mean that gender did not really matter. Although neither unusual nor exceptional, female property-ownership was “framed by patriarchal power.”Footnote 146 Gendered property relations and inheritance practices shaped and mediated the experiences of almost all female property-holders in the period, including how they claimed compensation. Trusts helped to protect women’s proprietorship but also, usually, served to control it; annuities secured on Caribbean estates were predetermined and immutable, and regularly left unpaid. Even as they provided women with access to property, these financial mechanisms reflected and reproduced ideas about male authority and female dependence. And while coverture was never all-encompassing, wives who claimed compensation rarely had complete financial autonomy. Yet the women who appear in the records of the Slave Compensation Commission were far from the “unconscious stipendiaries” they were presented as by both pro- and anti-slavery campaigners.Footnote 147 Many were actively involved in the compensation process, determined to demand money or property that they felt was rightfully theirs. Others bequeathed land in the Caribbean or wealth rooted in enslavement in their wills, often alongside a range of metropolitan and personal property, providing financial support for others—particularly female family and friends—in an economically uncertain world. These women were not simply passive transmitters of property and wealth; rather, they used property-ownership to negotiate and wield power within a patriarchal system that nonetheless always contained an element of flexibility.
But these women did not just own property, they enslaved other human beings; the restrictions they faced were nothing compared to those of the men, women, and children they claimed as property. Focusing primarily on exploring British women’s economic agency, and how they experienced and negotiated property-ownership, risks eliding the coercive and violent nature of many forms of property-holding. As bell hooks noted nearly forty years ago, historically white women have often “had a vested interest in the continued exploitation and oppression of others.”Footnote 148 As the example of Dorothy Little so starkly illustrates, in the early nineteenth century British women used the enslavement of others to claim, establish, and reinforce their own potentially precarious positions. They exercised their own property rights by stripping others of such rights, reifying property relations predicated on racial violence. Examining the endeavors of female enslavers and compensation claimants demonstrates the importance of interrogating the complex nexus of power relations—gendered, classed, and racialized—that underpinned how women in nineteenth-century Britain made and managed their money.
While this article has focused on female enslavers—a specific and particularly clear example of why it is important to think intersectionally about the ways in which nineteenth-century women negotiated and exercised power—I also hope it will help to raise broader questions about the politics that underpin the “recovery” of women’s histories. The history of enslavement is, after all, just one of the many violent and exploitative systems and practices enmeshed with property-ownership and money-making in the nineteenth century; many of the issues raised here have resonances with broader histories of colonialism, race, and capitalism. Over the last few decades feminist historians have helped to demonstrate unequivocally women’s centrality to the operation of the British economy in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But we also need to make sure we interrogate the assumptions that underpin positioning such work as “securing women’s rightful place” in these histories and be careful not to frame our scholarship in ways that can, unconsciously and unintentionally, replicate and reinforce different forms of power relations, particularly those related to race, coloniality, and class.Footnote 149 As Robin Runia has argued, the ability to reflect on “our own positionality regarding gender, race, and class and see where we benefit from these systems as well as suffer from them—is crucial to the future of feminist … scholarship.”Footnote 150 Interrogating the records of the Slave Compensation Commission demonstrates the many ways that British women experienced and negotiated property- and slave-ownership, complicating how we think about the operation of gendered—and racialized—power in the early nineteenth century.
Hannah Young is a Lecturer in History at the University of Greenwich. She would like to thank those who have generously commented on previous versions of this article, as well as the JBS reviewers and editors, all of whom have been hugely helpful in sharpening the arguments presented here. Please address any correspondence to h.l.young@greenwich.ac.uk
Open access
