Slave Manumissions and Freedmen in Seventeenth-Century Barbados

Abstract

T SHE wealthy sugar-producing island of Barbados, colonized in I 627, by the late seventeenth century possessed a huge slave population as well as a small but growing number of freedmen (free blacks and mulattoes). The life and socio-legal position of these freedmen during the late eighteenth century and first few decades of the nineteenth have been discussed previously, but lack of source materials has prevented detailed discussion for the seventeenth century. In particular, little could be said about manumission, a process that in Barbados, as in England's other New World colonies, largely accounted for the freedman group's origin and early growth.1 Manumission and the slave's access to legal freedom in the context of the slave society have long interested scholars of New World slavery. The relative ease or difficulty of manumission has been held to reflect a fundamental feature of the slave society and to serve as an indicator to how whites defined the slave's moral personality. Scholars seem to agree that manumissions were more common in Latin America than in North America (despite continuing disagreements over the relative severity of slave systems in the two areas and their fundamental differences or similarities); however, as Stuart B. Schwartz observed for the New World in general several years ago, very little is known about the manumission process or how it operated. Schwartz has made an important contribution to understanding manumission in Brazil, and several other recent quanti-