Chapter II.—: Sugar growing in Jamaica.

The original sugar planters of Jamaica—and the same was the case in all the other British islands in the West Indies—were residents in the colony, who settled there with the intention to live and to die there, and whose operations were principally carried on by means of their own capital. Such still continues to be the state of things in the Spanish islands, and, to a certain extent, also, in the French islands; but in all the English islands, in the course of the eighteenth century, a very different system was introduced. The sugars, after they were made, had to be sent to London or Bristol for sale; and the merchant employed to sell them was also employed to buy and send out the plantation supplies. Sometimes a drought, or hurricane, a negro revolt, or a maroon inroad, prevented any crop, or destroyed it. But the supplies must still be had. They were furnished on credit. A debt was contracted, which, frequently growing larger and larger, was finally secured by mortgage, with the condition to ship all the sugars in the merchant’s vessels, and consigned to his house. The debt growing larger and larger, finally the mortgage was foreclosed; and thus in many cases formally, in almost all the rest substantially, sooner or later most of the old estates passed into the hands of the few great English mercantile houses, known as the West India interest. The same process, precisely, was rapidly going on with our Virginia tobacco planters till the revolution put a stop to British credits; leaving unpaid, however, that great mass of British debts of which the Virginians struggled so hard to escape the payment; which had so injurious an influence on our domestic policy, having nearly plunged us into a premature new war with England, and the payment of which the Federal Government was finally obliged to assume.

Towards the middle of the last century, the market for sugars rapidly increasing, and coffee also having been introduced into the West Indies as a new staple, a great many new plantations were established by means of funds mainly advanced by these same West India houses, and, of course, secured by mortgage. But although the establishment of new plantations thus went on in Jamaica, as long as there was any new land fit for the purpose, we are not to suppose, with so many of our Jamaica letter writers, that a slave sugar plantation was a high road to opulence perfectly certain and sure. Bryan Edwards, the historian of the West Indies, himself an experienced planter, who had seen the elephant, informs us that while thirty thousand pounds sterling was the very smallest sum that would suffice to establish a paying plantation, the profits to be expected on this outlay—assuming a fair product and average prices—would not exceed seven per cent.; and this without charging a shilling for making good the decrease of the negroes,—a very heavy item,—or for the wear and tear of the buildings, or making any allowance for dead capital, or for the tax of six per cent. of the gross value levied on the crops of absentees. “With these and other drawbacks, to say nothing of the devastations, which are sometimes occasioned by fires and hurricanes, destroying in a few hours the labor of years, it is not wonderful,” he adds, “that the profits should sometimes dwindle to nothing, or, rather, that a sugar estate, with all its boasted advantages, should sometimes prove a millstone about the neck of its unfortunate proprietor, which is dragging him to destruction!” True Jamaica rhetoric that! A Jeremiad, too, uttered before emancipation was even so much as thought of; and yet, who wouldn’t suppose that it was copied word for word from some letter from some travelling correspondent come to hand by the very last mail from Kingston?

Anticipating that this plain and disenchanting statement might somewhat surprise some of the verdant, Edwards proceeds, on behalf of the said verdant, to put to himself this question: “Seeing that a capital is wanted which few men can command, and considering, withal, that the returns are in general but small, and at best uncertain, how has it happened that the sugar islands have been rapidly settled, and many a great estate purchased in the mother country from the profits which have accrued from their cultivation?”

“It were to be wished,” he says in reply, “that those who make such inquiries would inquire, on the other hand, how many unhappy persons have been totally and irretrievably ruined by adventuring in the cultivation of those islands without possessing any adequate means to support them in such great undertakings. On the failure of some of these unfortunate men, vast estates have indeed been raised by persons who have had money at command. Money is advanced and encouragement given to a certain point, but a skilful practitioner well knows where to stop; he is aware what very large sums must be expended before any return can be made. One third of the money thus expended he has, perhaps, furnished; but the time soon comes when a further advance is requisite. Now, then, is the moment for oppression. If the lands promise great returns, the sagacious creditor, instead of giving further aid, or leaving his too confident debtor to make the best of his way by his own exertions, pleads a sudden and unexpected emergency, and insists on immediate payment of the sum already lent. The law, on this occasion, is far from being chargeable with delay, and avarice is inexorable. A sale is hurried on, and no bidders appear but the creditor himself. Ready money is required in payment, and every one sees that a further sum will be wanting to make the estate productive. Few, therefore, have the means who have even the wish efficaciously to assist the devoted victim. Thus the creditor gets the estate at his own price, commonly for his first advance, and the miserable debtor has reason to thank his stars, if, consoling himself with only the loss of his own original capital, and his labor for a series of years, he escapes a prison for life.

“At the same time it cannot justly be denied that there are creditors who, having advanced their money to resident planters, not in the view of deriving undue advantages, but solely on the fair and honorable ground of reciprocal benefit, have been compelled, much against their inclination, to become planters themselves—being obliged to receive unprofitable West India estates in payment, or lose their money altogether. I have known plantations transferred in this manner which are a burden instead of a benefit, and which are kept up solely in the hope that favorable crops and an advance in prices may, some time or other, invite purchasers.

Thus oppression in one class of creditors, and gross injustice towards another, contribute equally to keep up cultivation in a country where, if the risks and losses are great, the gains are sometimes commensurate; for sugar estates there are, undoubtedly, from which, instead of the returns that I have estimated, double that profit has been obtained. It is indeed true that such instances are extremely rare; but, perhaps, to that very circumstance—which to a philosopher, speculating in his closet, would seem sufficient to deter a wise man from adventuring in this line of cultivation—it is chiefly owing that so much money has been expended in it. I mean the fluctuating nature of its returns. The quality of sugar varies occasionally so much as to create a difference in its value of ten shillings the hundred, which, for the superior quality, is pure gain. Much, undoubtedly, depends on skill in the manufacture; and, the process being apparently simple, the beholder feels almost an irresistible propensity to engage in it. Though, perhaps, not more than one man in fifty comes away fortunate, every sanguine adventurer takes it for granted that he shall be that one. Thus his system of life becomes a course of experiments, and if ruin should be the consequence of his rashness, he imputes his misfortunes to any cause rather than to his own want, and capacity, and foresight.”

These extracts from Edwards afford an insight into the rationale of slave cultivation according to the system which ultimately prevailed throughout the British West Indies, and to a very considerable extent also in the French and Dutch colonies. The motive power of the system, the real owners not only of the plantations and of the slaves, but of the nominal proprietors also, were a few great mercantile houses in Europe, with whom it was a leading object to secure the transportation of the sugars and of the plantation supplies in their vessels, with the commissions on their sale and purchase. It was these profits, and these alone, that sufficed to cover the numerous risks of sugar planting, and to justify the large advances which the business required.

Though often compelled to carry on the estates in their own names and at their own sole risk, these European merchants greatly preferred to stand in the relation of mortgagees—thus leaving all the risks to be borne, so long as they could stand under them, by nominal proprietors. These nominal proprietors were chiefly drawn from the mercantile class, or from the class of overseers, doctors, lawyers, master mechanics, and others, who, going out to the colonies to seek their fortunes, had gradually, as attachés to the plantations, accumulated a few thousand pounds—often, it was said, in the case of the overseers, by cheating their absent employers. Whatever resident in the colonies, by whatever means, succeeded in getting together a considerable sum of money, was drawn on, by a fascination like that of the gaming table, to invest it in a sugar plantation, which remained mortgaged for the balance to the European consignees of the produce. The certain ruin that in nineteen cases out of twenty attended this procedure was proverbial in the West Indies; yet few indeed who had the means, had the strength of mind to resist the temptation to become (nominal) proprietors—that being the height of West Indian glory and dignity; while a few fortunes acquired here and there by extraordinary crops or series of crops, or by a sudden rise in the sugar market, occasioned by war or other accident, served still to bait the trap.

It was thus that the European sugar houses absorbed every thing—not only the labor of the black slaves, but all the earnings and savings of their white employés also—drawn at last into a plantation investment—the nominal proprietors being scarcely less bond slaves than the very negroes themselves. To these few houses, and to these alone, was sugar planting, under the slave system, a profitable venture. To every body else employed in it, black or white, it was incessant, exhausting, and unrequited toil, except that the black people had a very scanty and insufficient supply of food and clothing,—the latter generally a rag about their loins,—and the white people a pretty good supply of these, with plenty of wine, brandy, ale, rum, and black mistresses, horses to ride, and negroes to domineer over. And this, under the most prosperous times of the slave system, constituted the entire sum and substance of Jamaica prosperity! But even this kind of prosperity, such as it was, carried with it the seeds of its own decay. Two things were absolutely essential to its continuance—an unlimited supply of new land, and an unlimited supply of new slaves to take the places of those annually used up on the plantations.

The era of the highest planter prosperity of Jamaica corresponds exactly with the era of the highest planter prosperity of Virginia—that is to say, the twenty years preceding the breaking out of our revolutionary war. During this period the market for colonial produce enlarged steadily. Jamaica and Virginia, from the establishments already made in them, had the decided advantage over newer and yet infant settlements. There was still a sufficiency of virgin land; slaves were imported in greater numbers than ever before, and the establishment of new plantations went on in an accelerated ratio. But soon the same inevitable drawback laid its claw upon both Jamaica and Virginia. The lands in both, suitable for plantations, began to be exhausted, and settlers and speculators began to seek out fresh lands elsewhere. The first great rival of Jamaica in this respect (what Cuba is to her now) was French St. Domingo. The cultivation of that colony in the latter half of the last century advanced with very rapid strides, and her exports from the period of the American war—from which Jamaica suffered greatly, in the starvation of her slaves and the loss of her accustomed supplies of lumber—began to rival and presently to exceed those of the English colony. The French revolution and its result, the self-emancipation of the slaves of St. Domingo, delivered Jamaica from that powerful and hated rival. But about the same time with this deliverance, a change was made in the policy of Spain respecting Porto Rico and Cuba, and these islands, hitherto without trade, and with a very limited population, presented themselves as new competitors in the business of sugar growing. Presently, too, by the abolition of the slave trade, Jamaica lost her annual supply of laborers, who thenceforward, down even to the present moment, have annually diminished. For though the total population of Jamaica has increased since emancipation, that increase consists of children not yet of an age for labor; while not only has the adult able-bodied population gone on still diminishing year by year, but the women, formerly employed equally with the men in the field and the sugar mill, from the necessity of taking care of their infant children and overseeing, not slave huts, but free households, have necessarily been withdrawn from plantation labor.

With her lands year after year more and more exhausted, her supply of labor diminishing, the protective sugar duties repealed, old and worn-out Jamaica is exposed to competition with new and fertile Cuba. Compare Virginia and Missouri, and their present rate of growth, and understand, O ye travellers and letter writers! why it is that the sugar growing interest declines in Jamaica and flourishes in Cuba; why it is that, in this particular line of sugar growing, the old emancipated colonies cannot compete with the new slave ones.