2010 - A 1748 "Petition of Negro Slaves" and The Local Politics of Slavery in Jamaica

A 1748 “Petition of Negro Slaves” and the Local Politics of Slavery in Jamaica
Author(s): James Roberston

Source: The William and Mary Quarterly , April 2010, Vol. 67, No. 2 (April 2010), pp.
319-346
Published by: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.67.2.319
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.67.2.319?seq=1&cid=pdf-
reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms
Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture is collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to The William and Mary Quarterly
This content downloaded from

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Sources and Interpretations
A 1748 “Petition of Negro Slaves” and
the Local Politics of Slavery in Jamaica
James Robertson
O
N May 9, 1748, a crowd of whites gathered in the main square
in Kingston, Jamaica, to protest a bill currently before the
island’s House of Assembly that aimed to protect the colony’s
slaves. During this meeting a townsman climbed up “above the people”
to read a satirical petition that claimed to be from the town’s slaves sup-
porting the bill and asserted that it would establish new courts to sub-
ject “the white Masters to the Black slaves.”1 It also congratulated two of
Kingston’s three assemblymen for promoting this goal. The handwritten
page was handed into the crowd; it was later forwarded to the Speaker of
the assembly and laid before that body on May 18. Copies that survive
James Robertson is a senior lecturer in history in the Department of History

and Archaeology at the University of the West Indies, Mona, in Kingston, Jamaica.
Earlier versions of this article were presented in the panel “Describing/Depicting the
Eighteenth-Century Caribbean” at the 33d annual meeting of the American Society
for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Apr. 3–7, 2002, Colorado Springs, Colorado; at a
symposium organized by the Social History Project, Apr. 12, 2003, at the University
of the West Indies, Mona; at the Text and Testimony Collective conference “City
Life in Caribbean History: Celebrating Bridgetown,” Dec. 11–13, 2003, Cave Hill,
Barbados; and to “Soundings: The Tenth-Anniversary Conference of the Atlantic
History Seminar,” Aug. 9–13, 2003, Cambridge, Mass. It benefited from comments
offered at all four venues and by Aviva Ben-Ur, Rollo Crookshank, Tom Krise,
Dayo Mitchell, Philip Morgan, Holly Snyder, Linda Sturtz, and, at the final stages,
by the Quarterly’s anonymous readers. A research grant from the Friends of the
Mandeville Library allowed the author to consult the Barnett/Hall Collection at the
Mandeville Special Collections Library of the University of California, San Diego.
He was able to consult further material while he held a Visiting International
Research Fellowship in the Department of History at Oxford Brookes University
and an Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship at the John Carter Brown Library.
1 “Petition of Negro Slaves, 1748,” May 9, 1748, in Barnett/Hall Collection, MS
220, box 3, folder 55, Mandeville Special Collections Library, University of
California, San Diego, La Jolla, Calif., v (“above the people”), r (“white Masters”).
The petition was originally an enclosure to William Hall to Thomas Hall, May 21,
1748, in Barnett/Hall Collection, MS 220, box 1, folder 26. Here and throughout the
footnotes I cite the petition by its official title, though in the text I refer to it as
Cudjoe’s petition.
William and Mary Quarterly, 3d Series, Volume LXVII, Number 2, April 2010

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
320 WILLIAM AND MARY QUARTERLY
illuminate an otherwise unexpected political controversy over a Jamaican

attempt to enforce the protective clauses in the island’s existing laws on
slavery and thereby to ease or ameliorate West Indian bondage. Amounting
to nearly one thousand words and signed with a cross by “Cudjoe” for the
“Kingston negroes &c,” this text was not, as one modern scholar described
it, “a very rare case of peaceful slave protest” commenting on a debate in
the House of Assembly.2 The petition commending the reform bill was
not written by slaves at all; instead, it was composed by Dr. James Smith,
a white physician who would later become known for his satiric poems
and who in this case intended the “Petition of Negro Slaves, 1748” (here-
after Cudjoe’s petition) to demonstrate how he believed the bill threat-
ened whites’ freedom.3
Scholars know remarkably little about whites’ attitudes toward slav-
ery in individual colonies before the 1750s. Even as a satire, Cudjoe’s
petition allows readers to hear the arguments that a proposed reform
provoked in Jamaica—arguments suggesting some of the ways that
English-language discussions of slavery developed in Britain’s colonies.
In the 1740s metropolitan comments on slaveholding or the slave trade
were sparse, and administrators in London focused their efforts on stop-
ping restraints from being placed on a legitimate branch of commerce.
In such contexts any attempts by colonial administrators or legislators to
ease slaves’ lives could neither appeal to British public opinion nor
expect official support in London. By the mid-1750s Quaker disavowals
of slave ownership and the slave trade grew firmer in Pennsylvania and
2 “Petition of Negro Slaves,” May 9, 1748, in Barnett/Hall Collection, MS 220,
box 3, folder 55, v (“Cudjoe”); Wilma Bailey, “Social Control in the Pre-
Emancipation Society of Kingston, Jamaica,” Boletín de estudios latinoamericanos y
del Caribe 24 (June 1978): 97–110 (“very rare case,” 107).
3 We do not have the original manuscript of the petition that Sir Charles Price,
the Speaker, laid before Jamaica’s House of Assembly on May 18, 1748, but four sub-
sequent copies survive. The earliest, on 342–46, is a contemporary transcript,
recopied during the session for individual assemblymen to examine and respond to
and apparently made in some haste, since it incorporates several dyslexic slips that
would occur in churning out multiple copies and the longer legal Latin terms are also
jumbled. This copy remains among the family papers of an assemblyman from
Westmoreland in western Jamaica, William Hall, who sent it home four days after the
petition was introduced (“Petition of Negro Slaves,” May 9, 1748, in Barnett/Hall
Collection, MS 220, box 3, folder 55). Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are
from this version. A further copy of the now-lost original was transcribed into the
manuscript journal of the assembly (May 10, 1748, in House of Assembly, Journals,
March 1744/45–August 1748, 1B/5/1/13, fols. 412–15, Jamaica Archives, Spanish
Town). That text was then recopied either during or just after the session with the
rest of the journal and sent to the Board of Trade in London (Minutes of the
Assembly in Jamaica, 1747–1751, Colonial Office 140/34, British National Archives,
Kew, Eng.). Fifty years later the version in the assembly’s manuscript journal was
the base text for the Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica ([Spanish Town], Jamaica,
1797), 4: 122–23 (May 18, 1748).

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
LOCAL POLITICS OF SLAVERY IN JAMAICA 321
then began to channel criticism back to Britain. A few residents in other

mainland North American colonies uttered occasional protests too,
though most local objections to further imports of enslaved Africans, even
when they invoked moral principles, usually stressed the potential threats
that more slaves posed to white public safety or the colony’s economic
development. At best such exchanges produced what Christopher Leslie
Brown describes as “Antislavery without Abolitionism”: a repugnance
toward the institution that offered no remedies.4 Yet occasional individu-
als in particular colonies attempted to tweak the margins of systems that
were not only brutal but also inherently unstable. Despite continued dis-
interest in Britain, several lines of argument that remained important in
all the later debates were defined during the preabolitionist period.5
Jamaica saw some of the earliest of these local efforts. Enslaved labor
underpinned the remarkable wealth Jamaica generated, but with a popu-
lation ratio of ten enslaved Africans to one European, the island’s white
settlers were always nervous. Charles Leslie’s claim in his 1739 New and
Exact Account of Jamaica that “No Country exceeds them in a barbarous
Treatment of Slaves” may well have been true.6 Yet slaves escaped and
plotted revolts even when faced with the harshest punishments. Mid-
eighteenth-century advocates for Jamaica’s white residents claimed that
the island’s laws incorporated clauses to protect slaves from excessive
4 Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism
(Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006), 33 (quotation).
5 For metropolitan law, see F. O. Shyllon, Black Slaves in Britain (Oxford,
1974), 24–25; Jonathan A. Bush, “The British Constitution and the Creation of
American Slavery,” in Slavery and the Law, ed. Paul Finkelman (Madison, Wis.,
1997), 379–418. On early-eighteenth-century British views of slavery, see John
Richardson, “Alexander Pope’s Windsor Forest: Its Context and Attitudes toward
Slavery,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 35, no. 1 (Fall 2001): 1–17; Catherine Molineux,
“Hogarth’s Fashionable Slaves: Moral Corruption in Eighteenth-Century London,”
English Literary History 72, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 495–520. For early antislavery in
Pennsylvania, see J. William Frost, ed., The Quaker Origin of Antislavery (Norwood,
Pa., 1980), 167–246; Gary B. Nash and Jean R. Soderlund, Freedom by Degrees:
Emancipation in Pennsylvania and Its Aftermath (New York, 1991), 41–55. James J.
Allegro sets out the case for local self-interest in Allegro, “‘Increasing and Strengthening
the Country’: Law, Politics, and the Antislavery Movement in Early-Eighteenth-
Century Massachusetts Bay,” New England Quarterly 75, no. 1 (March 2002): 5–23. For
some discussions in Massachusetts that did extend beyond political economy and
racism, see Kenneth P. Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards on Slavery and the Slave
Trade,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 54, no. 4 (October 1997): 823–34;
Kathryn S. Koo, “Strangers in the House of God: Cotton Mather, Onesimus, and an
Experiment in Christian Slaveholding,” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian
Society 117, no. 1 (April 2007): 143–76. For an articulation of principled local support
for the policy of excluding slaves on the Georgia frontier, see Harvey H. Jackson,
“The Darien Antislavery Petition of 1739 and the Georgia Plan,” WMQ 34, no. 4
(October 1977): 618–31.
6 [Charles Leslie], A New and Exact Account of Jamaica . . . (Edinburgh, 1739), 41.

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
brutality. After transcribing several of these laws, merchant-historian

James Knight argued that “the aforementioned Abstracts or Clauses [are]
sufficient to Show, the care, Justice, and tenderness of the Legislature
with regard” to slaves, though even he admitted wishing that the laws
“were at all times duly observed, and strictly put in Execution.”7
Having statutes on the books to restrain cruelty was one thing;
enforcing them was always quite another. A story circulating in the mid-
1740s described how a disgruntled white indentured laborer used
Jamaica’s slave laws for revenge on a bullying overseer who “gave him
two or three Licks with his Horse-whip” by bearing witness against the
overseer when he was “indicted for killing five Negroes, in five different
Indictments, by whipping them to Death.” Anger provoked “this
Fellow” to break the usual race-based code of silence and give evidence.
He “was the only Witness,” swearing out five separate depositions, after
which the overseer was “found guilty of murdering them all, and con-
demned to die,” though he then escaped.8 The colony’s apologists were
correct when they said that laws existed to defend slaves, but though
laws against excessive cruelty to slaves could allow a white servant’s
revenge on a whip-happy overseer, they failed to protect the slaves them-
selves. A white servant could testify to abuse; slaves could not.
The purported petition from Kingston’s slaves admits modern read-
ers to local discussions about a potential reform of the island’s slave
courts. The petition format allowed the satirist Smith to employ an
African Jamaican voice while articulating white slaveholders’ assump-
tions about freedom and slavery. Modern scholars have uncovered other
cases of eighteenth-century writers adopting slaves’ voices, essays claim-
ing to be arguments against slavery by individual slaves. Items such as the
1709 “Speech made by a Black of Guardaloupe,” the 1735 “Speech of
Moses Bon Sàam,” and the 1736 “Speech of Mr. John Talbot Campo-bell”
all encouraged readers to reconsider assumptions about the inherent dif-
ference and unreasonableness of enslaved Africans that rationalized slav-
ery. These compositions reveal the terms of contemporary discussions.
The 1748 petition is another mid-eighteenth-century text purportedly
written by slaves that sought to reaffirm social boundaries, though it was
unsympathetic to the slaves’ point of view. Unlike the earlier printed
7 James Knight, “Natural, Moral and Political History of Jamaica . . . to the
Year 1746,” vol. 2, British Library, London, Additional Manuscripts 12419, fol. 87
(quotations). On these laws, see David Barry Gaspar, “‘Rigid and Inclement’:
Origins of the Jamaica Slave Laws of the Seventeenth Century,” in The Many
Legalities of Early America, ed. Christopher L. Tomlins and Bruce H. Mann (Chapel
Hill, N.C., 2001), 78–96.
8 James Houstoun, “Dr. Houstoun’s Memoirs of His Own Life-Time,” in The
Works of James Houstoun, M.D. (London, 1753), 353 (quotations).

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
speeches, this petition was not destined for circulation in European lit-
erary magazines. It survives because it was transcribed during an investi-
gation by the Jamaica House of Assembly. Rather than constructing an
authentic argument for Kingston’s slaves, it sought to rouse white fears
for their own status. Adopting an African Jamaican voice offered a way
to highlight how the proposed legal reform threatened white urban vot-
ers and, indeed, the larger group who became famous in revolutionary
Saint Domingue as les petites blancs but who, as poor whites, rarely
appear as actors in Jamaican history. What would these audiences find
daunting about the proposed law’s prudent goal of enforcing the protec-
tion clauses in the island’s existing slave laws?9
The petition aimed to be divisive, claiming to offer the wholehearted
support of the island’s slaves for Robert Penny and Edward Manning,
two of the assemblymen representing Kingston. It credited Penny, the
island’s attorney general, with introducing the bill in the House of
Assembly and congratulated Manning for seconding the motion to bring
its first reading to a successful conclusion. The bill to allow the island’s
courts to accept evidence from slaves was one of two proposals for
reforming the island’s legal system laid before the 1748 assembly. Both
were introduced as “effectual means to enforce the present laws of this
island” to ease the lives of Jamaica’s enslaved, free black, and colored
populations. The first, the main subject of the petition, was produced
by a committee of the whole house and then entered under the catchall
title of a bill “for preventing the castration or other mutilation or dis-
memberment of slaves, without the authority of the magistrate.” As it
failed to pass, we do not know its specific terms. The second was “for
making negroes and mulattoes, born free, evidence in all the courts of this
island, against one another.”10 This second measure made the testimony
of Christian free blacks and people of color “good Evidence, in all Causes
9 On ventriloquizing, see Mark Reinhardt, “Who Speaks for Margaret Garner?
Slavery, Silence, and the Politics of Ventriloquism,” Critical Inquiry 29, no. 1 (Autumn
2002): 81–119. On the gaps between assigned and recorded speech, see John Lean and
Trevor Burnard, “Hearing Slaves Voices: The Fiscal’s Reports of Berbice and
Demerara-Essequebo,” Archives 27, no. 107 (October 2002): 120–33. For the texts sup-
posedly written by slaves, see Thomas W. Krise, ed., Caribbeana: An Anthology of
English Literature of the West Indies, 1657–1777 (Chicago, 1999), 93–140. On the
“Speech made by a Black of Guardaloupe, at the Funeral of a Fellow-Negro,” see Jack
P. Greene, “‘A plain and natural Right to Life and Liberty’: An Early Natural Rights
Attack on the Excesses of the Slave System in Colonial British America,” WMQ 57, no.
4 (October 2000): 793–808. On the other two speeches, see León-François Hoffmann,
“An Eighteenth Century Exponent of Black Power: Moses Bon Sàam,” Caribbean
Studies 15, no. 3 (October 1975): 149–61; Krise, “True Novel, False History: Robert
Robertson’s Ventriloquized Ex-Slave in The Speech of Mr. John Talbot Campo-Bell
(1736),” Early American Literature 30, no. 2 (1995): 152–64.
10 Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 119 (Apr. 29, 1748).

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
and Controversies, in all the Courts of this Island, against one another;
and all Courts are hereby authorized to receive their Testimony on Oath,
in that Behalf, in the same Manner as if they were White Inhabitants of
this Island” as long as they had been free for more than six months.11 This
concession remained qualified because Jamaica’s courts would not recog-
nize their evidence against whites. The measure did not move beyond
other colonies’ usages. By the mid-eighteenth century, several mainland
colonies already allowed slaves to testify in criminal trials against other
slaves, free people of color, or Amerindians, though often with the caveat
that such evidence was insufficient to deprive them “of Life or Member.”12
By April 30 both bills had survived their first readings, had gone to com-
mittee, and were due to emerge on May 9. Though a weeklong suspension
of the assembly delayed this timetable, the May 9 petition nevertheless
addressed current issues.13
Two more petitions that white townspeople signed to oppose these
proposed reforms show that the enforcement of Jamaica’s slave laws gener-
ated wide interest. Asserting “mastery” over slaves was central to poorer
whites’ status and sense of self.14 As a former assistant overseer recalled,
the “conversation of overseers . . . seldom extends further than . . . their
vast consequence and authority over the slaves.” 15 In societies where
purchasing a slave marked a decisive stage in a newcomer’s social inte-
gration, proposals to limit the ill-treatment of slaves threatened poorer
whites’ authority over the enslaved people who lived within their own
households. The measure also threatened the authority of overseers and
their assistants on the island’s great estates and of the attorneys (agents)
who supervised estates for absentee proprietors. Enforcing the laws that
governed slavery challenged vested interests.16
11 “An Act for making free Negroes, Indians, and Mulattoes Evidence in all
Causes against one another, in all the Courts of this Island,” Acts of Assembly, Passed
in the Island of Jamaica; From 1681, to 1754, inclusive (London, 1756), 290.
12 Thomas D. Morris, “Slaves and the Rules of Evidence in Criminal Trials,” in
Finkelman, Slavery and the Law, 209–39 (quotation, 210).
13 Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 119–20 (Apr. 29–30, 1748).
14 Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His
Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004), 91.
15 J. B. Moreton, West India Customs and Manners . . . , new ed. (London,
1793), 88.
16 On overseers, ibid.; Heather Cateau, “Beyond Planters and Plantership,” in
Beyond Tradition: Reinterpreting the Caribbean Historical Experience, ed. Cateau and
Rita Pemberton (Kingston, Jamaica, 2006), 3–21. On buying a slave as a cultural
transition, see Kirsten McKenzie, The Making of an English Slave-Owner: Samuel
Eusebius Hudson at the Cape of Good Hope, 1796–1807 (Rondebosch, South Africa,
1993), 53–67; Trevor Burnard, “Thomas Thistlewood Becomes a Creole,” in Varieties
of Southern History: New Essays on a Region and Its People, ed. Bruce Clayton and
John Salmond (Westport, Conn., 1996), 99–118. For attorneys, see B. W. Higman,
Plantation Jamaica, 1750–1850: Capital and Control in a Colonial Economy (Kingston,
Jamaica, 2005), 41–93, 137–226.

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:3an 1976 12:34:56 UTC
The proposed legislation faced opposition inside and outside the
House of Assembly. In Cudjoe’s petition Smith asserted that Manning
had wished to go straight to a second vote on the first reform bill on the
same day, to recognize slaves’ testimony without any further debate.
(Whether true or not, the assemblymen later saw this remark as the
point where Smith’s composition of the petition had breached their par-
liamentary privileges by offering a report on their debates.) Significantly,
the assembly voted to debate the bill again in a week, defeating a pro-
posal to table it for three months—well after the likely end of the cur-
rent assembly session. On May 12, three days after the date set for the
second reading, the assembly received a petition from “the freeholders,
inhabitants, and proprietors of slaves, the white inhabitants of the town
and parish of Kingston,” seeking “an authentic copy” of the bill.17 The
Kingston petitioners’ request for a copy of the current draft was refused,
and consideration of their petition was postponed until a committee of
the whole could discuss the bill. Two days later the assembly received
another petition, this time from the freeholders and inhabitants of
Spanish Town (where it met), also requesting a copy of the bill, which
by then was described in polarizing terms as a proposal for “erecting a
new court of justice, for trying the owners of slaves, and other persons
entrusted with the care of them, for castrating, mutilating, and dismem-
bering, of the said slaves.”18
Hitherto these procedural snippets made up almost everything that
scholars knew about this proposed reform. The Journals of the Assembly of
Jamaica shows that on May 13, the day before the Spanish Town petition
was received, the second reform bill to give the colony’s free people of
color a limited voice before the island’s courts also received its second
reading. Despite extended debate and one amendment, this second bill
passed and proceeded to the Governor’s Council (the assembly’s second
chamber). There it breezed through all its readings without any further
trouble and became one of seven acts that received Governor Edward
Trelawny’s signature at the end of the session. The prospects for the first
proposed legislative reform to Jamaica’s slave laws still looked promising
on May 18. The item recorded in the Journals immediately before the tran-
scription of Cudjoe’s petition was the passage of a motion “that a commit-
tee be appointed, to inspect the laws relating to the trial of negroes.”19
17 Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 120 (May 12, 1748).
18 Ibid., 4: 121 (May 14, 1748, quotation). For the complaint against his breach
of privilege, see W. Hall to T. Hall, May 21, 1748, in Barnett/Hall Collection, MS
220, box 1, folder 26. On voting to give the bill a second reading, see Journals of the
Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 120 (Apr. 30, 1748). For the petitions from Kingston and
Spanish Town, ibid., 4: 120–21 (May 12, 14, 1748).

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
But though the assembly refused to grant what the petitions from
Kingston and Spanish Town both requested—public access to copies of
the first draft bill—the white townspeople who signed the petitions had
employed an effective tactic to register their disquiet and derail a con-
tentious innovation. The motion deferring the bill’s second reading for
three months was reintroduced, and this time it passed. The bill never
returned to the assembly floor.20
The petition “Cudjoe” allegedly sent to Manning fits into this leg-
islative chronology. It circulated while signatures were being gathered for
the townspeople’s petition. Claiming to praise Manning and Penny for
throwing their support behind the most contentious of the new bills, it
helped inflame suspicions against their motives. The petition suggested
that the two assemblymen were advancing a pet project by the governor
to benefit the island’s slaves at the expense of Jamaica’s white settlers
rather than protecting their constituents’ interests. Further assertions
made by Robert Dallas, a second Kingston physician and opponent of
the bill, also spelled out the connection between the governor and Penny,
the colony’s attorney general. Dallas not only “read, to a number of peo-
ple then together . . . what he called a copy of a bill” but also asserted
that what Penny had introduced was “the governor’s bill . . . writ in his
secretary’s hand-writing, and interlined or amended by the governor and
Mr. Penny,” all of which led to Penny being threatened “as a favourer of
the bill.” 21 Support from the island’s long-established and respected
Governor Trelawny did not make proposals for reforming slavery any less
contentious. After a late-night sitting, an assemblyman commented that
“some persons att Kingston [were] ordered into Custody for reviling &
abusing some persons of the assembly about the negroe bill.”22
20 Summarizing such work, Robert Worthington Smith, “The Legal Status of
Jamaican Slaves before the Anti-Slavery Movement,” Journal of Negro History 30, no.
3 (July 1945): 293–303, esp. 301–2. On the second bill’s process, see Journals of the
Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 121 (May 13, 1748); May 18–19, July 13, 1748, in Journals of the
Council, May 1747–February 1756 (unfoliated), 1B/5/4/10, Jamaica Archives. The
Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica does not record what was altered by the amend-
ment added to the second bill during its second reading. Any one of three explanatory
clauses could have been inserted at this juncture. One stated that the new law would
not allow the courts to accept free people of color’s evidence against “any Negroes,
Indians, or Mulattoes, that have the Liberties of White Persons,” another removed the
distinction that earlier laws included between freeborn people and manumitted slaves,
and a third stated that manumitted witnesses had to have been free for six months
(Acts of Assembly, 290). On its passage, see Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 143
(Aug. 13, 1748). On voting to postpone the second reading of the first bill for three
months, see Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 121 (May 14, 1748).
22 William Hall to Thomas Hall, May 18, [1748], in Barnett/Hall Collection,
MS 220, box 1, folder 25.

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
The extramural campaigning undertaken after the bill proceeded
through its initial reading had roused political passions in Jamaica’s two
principal towns, Kingston and Spanish Town, which together housed
more than 40 percent of the island’s small white population. The four
paragraphs in the 1748 petition each address different concerns. The first
commented on a new court that would allow slaves to be not only wit-
nesses but also plaintiffs. Smith aimed to demonize this innovation by
claiming the court would imprison white witnesses or defendants for
contempt and asserting that the new court’s jurisdiction would reach
well beyond slaves and end up denying “the white men of this island . . .
that shelter to which for so many years they have Fled[:] a Fair Tryal by
Juries and lawfull witnesses.”23 This last assertion appeared particularly
damaging because no West Indian courts accepted a slave’s testimony as
a “positive legal witness.” 24 Recognizing enslaved witnesses’ evidence
threatened to allow slaves “possession of the promised land.” In this
instance Smith slipped back to restating his intended slaveholding audi-
ence’s presuppositions, as the next phrase asserts that passing the bill
would therefore be “Contrary to our natural rights as men”: the sense of
the “our” here, one of the few invocations of natural rights in the whole
petition, implies that “nature” intended slaves to have fewer rights.
Passing the bill, Smith continued, would be “contrary also to your dar-
ling Constitution of Britain Contrary to Religion & Morality & finally
contrary to Equity & good Conscience,” a list summarizing the legal
box 3, folder 55, r.
24 Karl Watson, ed., “Murder Most Foul: The Case of Peter Archer and
Jonathan John Franklin,” Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 47
(November 2001): 194–206 (quotation, 195). The “positive legal witness” phrase is
from the testimony in a Barbados murder case in 1772, where a slave saw one white
man murder another. This evidence was only cited indirectly, and the slave was
never put on oath. See also Watson, “Capital Sentences against Slaves in Barbados in
the Eighteenth Century: An Analysis,” in In the Shadow of the Plantation: Caribbean
History and Legacy, ed. Alvin O. Thompson (Kingston, Jamaica, 2002), 196–221, esp.
203–4. For similar issues in Saint Kitts in 1753, see Natalie Zacek, “Voices and
Silences: The Problem of Slave Testimony in the English West Indian Law Court,”
Slavery and Abolition 24, no. 3 (December 2003): 24–39. Slaveholders’ scruples about
recognizing slaves’ testimony were only overridden in Berbice in 1817 when Britain’s
Secretary of State for the Colonies expressed an interest. See Thompson, “The
Chastisement of the Slave ‘America,’” Journal of Caribbean History 33, nos. 1–2 (Fall
1999–Spring 2000): 146–61, esp. 150–53. In 1821 another prosecutor in British
Honduras attempted to bypass the prohibition by claiming that three witnesses to
the maltreatment of a slave were free people of color who had been wrongfully
enslaved. See Assad Shoman, 13 Chapters of a History of Belize (Belize City, Belize,
1994), 44–45. These incidents were all exceptional. For a Virginia case in 1806 that
excluded slave testimony to allow an alleged murderer to walk free, see W. Edwin
Hemphill, “Examinations of George Wythe Swinney for Forgery and Murder: A
Documentary Essay,” WMQ 12, no. 4 (October 1955): 543–74, esp. 566–68.

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
and religious “liberty” that defined English and Anglo-Jamaican asser-

tions of their “freedom.”25 This section of Cudjoe’s petition reaffirmed
slaveholders’ assumptions.26
The issue of lawful witnesses was raised because the proposed court
planned to recognize slaves’ testimony. If slaves gave evidence of cruelty,
they would testify against whites; furthermore, that evidence would have
to be given under oath. Oaths mattered in English culture, even if con-
versations were laced with profanity, and the wider society recognized a
distinction between the reverend and profane use of oaths. The provi-
sion to accept slaves’ evidence provoked the longest elaborations on the
consequences of the proposed innovation in Cudjoe’s petition. With
only the narrowest exceptions, courts in British territories refused to rec-
ognize the evidence of slaves against free people and would not do so
until emancipation. Apologists for the status quo might acknowledge
that “the controul under which the negro is necessarily placed, leaves a
great deal in the power of a vindictive manager” and that “it must be
expected that, under such a government, abuses will exist.” 27 By the
1820s the opinions of some whites may have shifted, as admissions that
“there are some persons in Jamaica favourable to the principle of negro
evidence being admitted” suggest, but even these statements remained
qualified because “the prejudices against this measure are . . . still
strong.”28 The time was not yet ripe for such an innovation. As far as
the Jamaican slave regime was concerned, it never would be. Looking
back from the 1840s, the brutal truth appeared far clearer: “so long as
negro evidence, on oath, was not admitted,” then “the slave was at the
white man’s mercy; who could torture to his heart’s content, (if he was
so disposed,) with perfect impunity.”29
box 3, folder 55, r (quotations).
26 Offering contemporary estimates for white residential patterns, see [Charles
White], An Inquiry Concerning the Trade, Commerce, and Policy of Jamaica, Relative
to the Scarcity of Money, and the Causes and bad Effects of such Scarcity, peculiar to that
Island . . . (1750; repr., London, 1759), 78–79. On slaveholders’ assumptions, see Jack
P. Greene, “Liberty, Slavery, and the Transformation of British Identity in the
Eighteenth-Century West Indies,” Slavery and Abolition 21, no. 1 (April 2000): 1–31,
esp. 1–14.
27 John Williamson, Medical and Miscellaneous Observations, Relative to the West
India Islands (Edinburgh, 1817), 1: 134–36 (February 1801; “controul,” 1: 134, “it must
be expected,” 1: 135).
28 H. T. de la Beche, Notes on the Present Condition of the Negroes in Jamaica
(London, 1825), 49.
29 B. J. Vernon, Early Recollections of Jamaica with the Particulars of an Eventful
Passage Home via New York and Halifax at the Commencement of the American War in
1812 . . . (London, 1848), 26 (quotations). On legal oaths, see John Spurr, “A Profane
History of Early Modern Oaths,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser.,
11 (2001): 37–63, esp. 62. In the 1780s the draft Negro Code Edmund Burke planned

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
With Jamaica’s courts refusing to accept evidence from slaves, all the
laws protecting slaves were effectively unenforceable. This was true up
to emancipation in 1834; it was already true in 1748. The 1748 petition
viewed the question differently, however, offering a rationale for existing
practices by asserting that if the first bill passed, slaves would be able to
offer perjured testimony “against our white Masters Mistresses overseers
or attorneys or servants” so that the new court would rein in “the abomi-
nable pride of any white man.” Furthermore, the petition claimed,
because the court created by the new law would be able to imprison any
slave for refusing to give evidence, its nominated judges could incarcerate
slaves until they would “think on something to say” against anyone whom
the judges or their patrons disliked.30 Nor was this last fear completely
unreasonable: in the absence of any legal requirement for regular jail
deliveries for imprisoned slaves on the island, malicious whites took out
their spite against other slaveholders by swearing out accusations against
a rival’s slaves, leading to the targeted slaves’ prolonged incarceration.
Smith aimed to show that if the new law passed, whites could be
harassed by vengeful slaves or vindictive officials. The petition thereby
reemphasized the centrality of legal privilege not only in English views
of liberty but also in all West Indian whites’ dealings with slaves.31
to offer Parliament included a clause to defend female slaves from assaults by sailors
during the Middle Passage, which would have docked the pay of sailors and officers
“on the testimony of the woman so abused, and one other,” but this proposal was
never taken to legislators in Britain or the West Indies. See Benedict Der, “Edmund
Burke and Africa, 1772–1792,” Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana 11
(1970): 9–26, esp. 24–25 (quotation, 25). In 1788 the Assembly of Jamaica passed leg-
islation permitting local magistrates to hear appeals from slaves against their masters’
cruelty. If the slaves were Christians and produced proper certificates, a magistrate
could set up a Court of Protection that would accept their testimony. Besides its
complicated operation, the procedure offered no remedy when local juries returned
verdicts of ignoramus. See Robert E. Luster, The Amelioration of the Slaves in the
British Empire, 1790–1833 (New York, 1995), 37–39. A further exception in 1807
allowing military courts-martial to accept slaves’ testimony remained controversial.
See Roger N. Buckley, “The Admission of Slave Testimony at British Military
Courts in the West Indies, 1800–1809,” in A Turbulent Time: The French Revolution
and the Greater Caribbean, ed. David Barry Gaspar and David Patrick Geggus
(Bloomington, Ind., 1997), 226–50. The Assembly of Jamaica’s proposed 1826 Slave
Code included instances where courts might accept some slaves’ evidence but,
though the Secretary of State for the Colonies commended these clauses, the code
was still disallowed. See Slave Law of Jamaica: With Proceedings and Documents
Relative Thereto (London, 1828), 134–38, 153. See also Luster, Amelioration of the
Slaves, 42. The proposal remained under consideration for the 1831 Jamaican Slave
Code. See Robert Worthington Smith, “The Attempt of British Humanitarianism to
Modify Chattel Slavery,” in British Humanitarianism: Essays Honoring Frank J.
Klingberg, ed. Samuel Clyde McCulloch (Philadelphia, 1950), 166–80, esp. 177.
31 For planters imprisoning their rivals’ slaves, see [Brian Edwards], Notes on the
Two Reports from the Committee of the Honourable House of Assembly of Jamaica,

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
The arguments in the rest of the petition are sketchier. The second
paragraph accuses Manning of endeavoring to push the bill through the
assembly before the signatures were gathered for “a petition of the white
men”—that is, either the Kingston or the Spanish Town petition. The
third paragraph, only a couple of sentences long, throws out some stray
comments on the other legal reform before the assembly, the bill to permit
all the island’s courts to accept sworn evidence from free people of color
when they testified against each other, though not against whites. Here
readers can compare this bill, which passed, with Smith’s partisan charac-
terization of it in Cudjoe’s petition as legislation to “put all Mulattoes free
or slaues on a [footing]” with the island’s Jewish community.32 This was an
overstatement. Jews’ refusal to swear Christian oaths kept them off juries
and out of local office, but the colony’s courts accepted their testimony
against white Christians. When this new law was enacted, Jamaica’s free
people of color gained only the ability to give evidence against each other.
By invoking a spurious parallel with Jews’ oaths, Smith aimed to obscure
the limits on the privileges being offered. Instead the petition went further,
asserting that free people of color—and slaves—would “to all intents &
purposes be deemed as good sufficient & lawful witnesses against the said
people called Jews.” It claimed that such radical changes would effect “an
extirpation of the Jews” on the island.33 Just how perjured testimony would
destroy the island’s Jewish community was unclear, though the argument
appears similar to a story that circulated in Antigua to explain why “there
are no Jews” there, which stated that the island’s “Inhabitants have so little
Opinion of [the Jews’] Honesty, that it is said, a Negro’s Oath is suffered to
be taken against them.”34 The further assertion in Cudjoe’s petition that
slaves’ testimony would ruin Jamaica’s Jews also fitted in with assumptions
that free and enslaved Africans constituted a sizable proportion of the cus-
tomers for the island’s Jewish shopkeepers. “Cudjoe” then added another
alarmist claim: “subjecting the white Masters to the Black slaves” would
discourage white immigration, weakening Jamaica militarily.35
Appointed To examine into, and to report to the House, the Allegations and Charges con-
tained in the several Petitions which have been presented to the British House of
Commons, on the Subject of the Slave Trade, and the Treatment of the Negroes, &c. &c.
&c. (London, 1789), 29–30.
33 Ibid. (quotations).
34 Robert Poole, “The Beneficent Bee or Traveller’s Companion—Part 2,” 1756,
ed. Karl Watson, Journal of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society 47 (November
2001): 241 (Apr. 13, [1748], quotations). I am grateful to Linda Sturtz for this refer-
ence.
box 3, folder 55, r. Complaints about perjury by Jewish witnesses and suggestions

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
The final paragraph in Cudjoe’s petition addressed one more piece of
legislation before the assembly: the “Deficiency Law,” originally intended
to encourage white settlement and secure white recruits for the militia by
levying a substantial fine on households that did not employ one white
man for every thirty slaves, for every 150 head of cattle, or for a tavern or
retail shop. When Smith composed his petition, the Deficiency Law was
up for renewal. The 1748 version included an amendment allowing house-
holds to fulfill their deficiency quotas by “children, both male and female,
of eight years of age or upwards.”36 Here the petition proposed a further
satiric amendment, requiring the arms and ammunition kept in the great
house of every plantation to be instead “lodged, [in] the Black drivers or
favourite Negroes house.” 37 Whites would see this suggestion as self-
evidently absurd. Overseers were expected to search the slave lines for
weapons every other week. Tagging such a demand onto the petition
made it clear that the whole text was a fake, though here Smith tapped
into poor whites’ bitterness at the influence favored slaves could have on
individual estates. Unskilled whites who found work on estates resented
that their whiteness did not always raise their status above the estate’s
“Confidential Slaves”: the enslaved drivers and other skilled craftsmen,
along with the owner’s, attorney’s, or overseer’s “favourite women.”38
that Jamaica’s courts should cease to recognize their testimony demonstrate the cur-
rency of Jews’ oaths. See Moreton, West India Customs and Manners, 66–67. For
comments on slaves as customers at Jews’ shops, see Long, History of Jamaica, 1: 573.
I am grateful to Holly Snyder for this reference.
36 Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 141 (Aug. 12, 1748).
box 3, folder 55, r.
38 John Campbell, “Reassessing the Consciousness of Labour and the Role of
the ‘Confidentials’ in Slave Society: Jamaica, 1750–1834,” Jamaican Historical Review
21 (2001): 23–30 (“Confidential Slaves,” 24), 59–62; Linda L. Sturtz, “The 1780
Hurricane Donation: ‘Insult Offered Instead of Relief,’” Jamaican Historical Review
21 (2001): 38–46 (“favourite women,” 43), 66–68. On deficiency, see Journals of the
Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 141 (Aug. 12, 1748); N. A. T. Hall, “Some Aspects of the
‘Deficiency’ Question in Jamaica in the Eighteenth Century,” Caribbean Studies 15,
no. 1 (April 1975): 5–19. This bill’s earlier stages followed a similar itinerary through
the assembly to the two bills for legal reform; see Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica,
4: 121–22 (May 13–14, 1748), 143 (Aug. 12, 1748). On overseers’ searches, see Knight,
“Natural, Moral and Political History,” vol. 2, BL, Add. MSS 12419, fols. 84v–85. For
slaves’ accustomed rights, see Heather Cateau, “Freedom Road: The Empowerment of
the Enslaved Population by the Eighteenth Century,” in Freedom: Retrospective and
Prospective, ed. Swithin R. Wilmot (Kingston, Jamaica, 2009), 59–77. For a
Barbados case of an enslaved family that had gained some privileges, see Karl
Watson, A Kind of Right to Be Idle: Old Doll, Matriarch of Newton Plantation (Cave
Hill, Barbados, 2000). On the enslaved Phibbah and the roles she made for herself
as “housekeeper” for two overseers, see Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire,
228–40. For whites’ grumbling, see Moreton, West India Customs and Manners, 51,
77–85, 93–97, 127–28; Karina Williamson, ed., Marly; Or, A Planter’s Life in Jamaica
(Oxford, 2005), 44–46, 48–50.

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
The petition’s exaggerations became increasingly extreme with the

last paragraph’s scriptural references. A comment that handing the plan-
tation’s weapons over to the African Jamaican favorites’ or the drivers’
custody would “prevent the violence” occurring “per Purim” invoked an
Old Testament passage (Esther 9:1, 5), a story of when “the Jews had rule
over them that hated them” within the Persian Empire and “smote all
their enemies with the stroke of the sword, and slaughter, and destruc-
tion.” 39 The scriptural reference offered a daunting parallel for an
oppressed people undertaking a coordinated assault on their enemies.
The petition suggests a wide awareness of the Jewish Purim holiday
among white Christians in mid-eighteenth-century Kingston, which is
feasible enough given the prominence of the Purim celebrations within
other Jewish communities in the eighteenth-century Caribbean.40
An investigation subsequent to the circulation of the document in
the crowd on May 9 revealed that Cudjoe’s petition was in fact a mis-
chievous text written by Smith. The assembly condemned him for
breaching its privileges by describing its debates, which was a procedural
technicality, not a comment on content. What remains striking is that
Smith chose to adopt a petition format. He mimicked an actual petition’s
legal forms in his flowery opening: “The humble Petition of the innocent
distressed sons of Christ, (commonly called the negro slaves) of the said
Town and precinct.” Smith included standard Latin legal phrases and con-
cluded, “And your petitioners shall ever pray &c,” as other petitions
would, adding not just “the mark + Cudjoe for Kingston negroes” and the
lawyerly “Cudjoe saith the above petition is true to his knowledge & fur-
ther saith not” but even a notary’s standard, “The mark X of Cudjoe
sworn before me,” along with the date.41 The call for white masters to be
subjected to their black slaves and the request to place armaments in slave
hands undercut all the pseudopetition’s attempts at verisimilitude. Its
intended audience would recognize it as a satire before reaching the end.42
box 3, folder 55, r (“prevent the violence”); Esther 9:1 (“Jews had rule”), 5 (“smote all
their enemies”).
40 Aviva Ben-Ur alerted me to the importance of Purim in the Jewish commu-
nities of late-eighteenth-century Suriname and Curaçao.
box 3, folder 55, r (“humble Petition”), v (“your petitioners”).
42 A committee was established to deal with James Smith’s breach of assembly
privilege. Subsequent contentious pamphlets were referred to the same committee.
The current bibliographic consensus has Smith falling even deeper into the assem-
bly’s bad graces later the same month, after a copy of an anonymous pamphlet pub-
lished in London twenty months earlier, which described activities in the assembly’s
1746 session, finally reached Jamaica. See A Letter from a Friend at J[amaica], to a
Friend in London: Giving An Impartial Account of the Violent Proceedings of the Faction
in that Island (London, [1746?]). The assembly responded to it as another breach of

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
The terms that Smith chose to describe Jamaica’s slaves were sugges-
tive. They were “the innocent distressed sons of Christ” in the transcript
of the petition made for an assembly member and the “sons of Chus” in
the version later published in the Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica.43 The
“sons of Christ” formula, whether it was Smith’s coinage or a clerk’s
uncorrected slip, along with the repeated scriptural allusions in the peti-
tion, may imply that the right to give evidence under oath in the new
court would be restricted to slaves who had been baptized, an issue that
had been raised twenty years earlier in wider discussions about converting
and baptizing slaves. The phrase highlights a continuing recognition in
Jamaica of the importance of Christian baptism as a rite of passage for
both slaves and free blacks. By the mid-eighteenth century, the argument
that baptizing slaves would lead to their being freed had been rejected
across Britain’s empire, though at least one late-seventeenth-century visitor
had left Jamaica believing it was still current. Legal documents did not
record whether a slave was Christian, though the distinction was invoked
in the petitions that individual African Jamaicans presented to the House of
Assembly requesting freedom and its privileges “as if white.”44 Subsequent
petitions from free black populations elsewhere in the British West Indies
invoked their Christianity too. In this instance the scriptural allusions
went further, not only referencing Purim and comparing slavery in
Jamaica to “Egyptian” bondage but also describing the enslaved petition-
ers as “the antient Descendants of the Grandson of the Patriarch Noah”
(Cham, the son of Cush).45 This comment certainly highlighted the biblical
privilege. A series of angry resolutions ended with the decision “that the pamphlet
complained of, be laid before the committee . . . to whom the libel said to be writ by
doctor Smith . . . is referred, for their consideration.” See Journals of the Assembly of
Jamaica, 4: 127 (May 25, 1748). This order hardly pins its authorship on Smith, and
the petition that he did write in 1748 reversed the Letter’s positive comments about
Governor Edward Trelawny and Edward Manning. Augustus Hervey, then a Royal
Navy lieutenant, later described writing the Letter during his voyage home in David
Erskine, ed., Augustus Hervey’s Journal: Being the Intimate Account of the Life of a
Captain in the Royal Navy Ashore and Afloat, 1746–1759 (London, 1953), 38–39, 311.
The manuscript remains among the Hervey family’s papers (Bristol MS 941/50/5,
West Suffolk Records Office, Bury Saint Edmunds, Eng.). Nothing else in the
Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica links Smith with the Letter.
box 3, folder 55, r (“innocent”); Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 122 (“sons of
Chus”).
44 Linda L. Sturtz, “Mary Rose: ‘White’ African Jamaican Woman? Race and
Gender in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” in Gendering the African Diaspora: Women,
Culture, and Historical Change in the Caribbean and Nigerian Hinterland, ed. Judith
A. Byfield, LaRay Denzer, and Anthea Morrison (Indianapolis, Ind., 2010), 84–118
(quotation, 91).

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
“sons of Ham” theme that would remain central to many later defenses of
slavery. Here the petition took the idea of Hamatic descent further than
usual, asserting that claim’s obverse: rather than being set apart by a curse,
African slaves were fellow descendants from Noah.46
None of these points cushioned the petition’s pessimism about the
most radical element of the proposed legal reform: the new court’s will-
ingness to accept slave testimony. Despite invoking so many biblical ref-
erences, “Cudjoe” tacitly admits that slaves were not Christians and that
the proposed new court would accept testimony on the “bare word” of
slaves who “[knew] not the meaning of an oath.”47 In this claim white
Christianity, when contrasted to African heathenism, became central to
the legal identity denied to slaves. According to this reasoning, without
Christianity slaves did not understand the true meaning of an oath,
which bound them before God and threatened punishment in the next
46 Robert Robertson raised the issue of freeing Christian converts twenty years
earlier in wider discussions of converting and baptizing slaves in [Robertson], A
Letter to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of London . . . (London, 1730), 101–2
(Nov. 29, 1729). I am grateful to Linda Sturtz for this reference. A comment in a
1738 Barbados law on slaves’ testimony against free people of color included the
phrase “whether baptized or not,” a distinction that the editor of the island’s laws
would dismiss in 1764. See Richard Hall, Acts, Passed in the Island of Barbados. From
1643, to 1762 . . . (London, 1764), 325 (quotation). For the belief that Christian slaves
would be freed, see David Buisseret, ed., Jamaica in 1687: The Taylor Manuscript at the
National Library of Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica, 2008), 286–87. Such slaves would have
to serve seven years first. Colonial assemblies rejected the argument that baptism freed
slaves, and missionaries retreated, hoping masters would permit them access to some
slaves. See Michael Anesko, “So Discreet a Zeal: Slavery and the Anglican Church in
Virginia, 1680–1730,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 93, no. 3 (July 1985):
247–78; John C. Van Horne, introd. to Religious Philanthropy and Colonial Slavery: The
American Correspondence of the Associates of Dr. Bray, 1717–1777 (Urbana, Ill., 1985),
1–47, esp. 25–32. On the 1729 English legal opinion that “baptism doth not bestow free-
dom” along with the importance of marriage and baptism among people of color in
eighteenth-century England, see James Walvin, England, Slaves and Freedom, 1776–1838
(Jackson, Miss., 1986), 39 (quotation), 34, 51–54, 58–62; also Shyllon, Black Slaves in
Britain, 25. For the continuing importance of Christianity in petitions to the Jamaica
House of Assembly for free status, see Sturtz, “Legislating Whiteness in Eighteenth-
Century Jamaica” (paper presented at the 33d annual meeting of the American Society
for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Apr. 3–7, 2002, Colorado Springs, Colo.). Pedro L. V.
Welch notes an 1811 petition to the Barbados House of Assembly in Welch, Slave Society
in the City: Bridgetown, Barbados, 1680–1834 (Kingston, Jamaica, 2003), 190–91. For
early critiques of slavery, see David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western
Culture (Oxford, 1966), 451–53. For a 1680s critique, ibid., 339–41; Philippe Rosenberg,
“Thomas Tryon and the Seventeenth-Century Dimensions of Antislavery,” WMQ 61,
no. 4 (October 2004): 609–42; Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in
the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600–2000 (Cambridge, 2006).

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
world, so their promises to tell the truth in court could not be trusted.
Though whites such as Smith refused to allow the courts to recognize the
evidence of enslaved non-Christians, they continued to worry about
slaves who took oaths of secrecy before discussing slave plots, while in the
1738 and 1739 treaties both the British Crown and the Jamaica Assembly
acknowledged that the island’s Maroons could make binding oaths.48
The petition attributed to “Cudjoe” illuminates an urban white
proslavery reaction to a proposal to enforce the protection clauses in
Jamaica’s slave laws. We do not have the testimony the assemblymen
heard when they met to investigate Cudjoe’s petiton. The version of the
petition communicated to the Speaker of the assembly, however, was
accompanied by a sworn affidavit by Thomas French, a prominent
Kingston merchant, describing how he obtained it and reporting the
reaction of a larger cross-section of Kingston’s white population. On May
9 French was “passing by the Court house,” which stood on Kingston’s
main square, and saw a crowd gathered there. He observed Archibald
Willock, a Kingston wharfinger, “standing on something that raised him
above the people . . . reading” this “paper writing.” Even before Willock
finished reading, another member of the crowd, Conyers Dobby, “said
that was not the Business they were met about,” so Willock handed the
paper down to the crowd and French “took it & brought it away with
him.” French was a substantial figure in local affairs, so it seems likely
that if he put his hand out, the sheet would be passed to him. French also
swore to being “well acquainted with” Smith’s handwriting, “having
oftentimes seen him write,” and recognizing it on the page.49 The assem-
bly called Willock before it and, after questioning him, concluded that
by reading the petition aloud he was guilty of publishing a libel but that
he should still be discharged “without fees,” suggesting the assemblymen
were persuaded that he was not involved in its composition.50
What French appears to have walked past was a meeting drumming
up support for the petition from “the freeholders, inhabitants, and proprie-
tors of slaves, the white inhabitants of the town and parish of Kingston”
who wanted access to the bill’s exact wording so they could mount a
48 Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire, 4; Kenneth Bilby, “Swearing by the
Past, Swearing to the Future: Sacred Oaths, Alliances, and Treaties among the
Guianese and Jamaican Maroons,” Ethnohistory 44, no. 4 (Fall 1997): 655–89.
box 3, folder 55, v (quotations).
50 Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 127 (May 26, 1748, quotation). For the
assembly’s investigation of Archibald Willock, ibid., 4: 125–27 (May 20–26, 1748).
For Thomas French, ibid., 4: 126 (May 24, 1748). Later in 1748 the Kingston vestry
hired slaves from French, and by 1750 he was a Justice of the Peace. See Oct. 30,
1748, in Kingston Parish Accounts, 1722–1759, 2/6/155, Jamaica Archives; Sept. 17,
1750, in Kingston Vestry Minutes, 1750–1752, pt. 1, 2/6/2, fol. 138, Jamaica Archives.

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
more effective opposition to it.51 Who was present? Willock, the Kingston
wharfinger, not only owned a house on Kingston’s Port Royal Street
(down by the docks) five years later but also owned the house next door,
besides being posthumously accorded the status of “gent.” As for Dobby,
“gentleman,” his probate inventory listed a single enslaved boy as his
most substantial asset.52 Thus this meeting to criticize the actions of two
of Kingston’s assemblymen included property-holding voters. Dallas,
who was also brought before the assembly for reading out his objections
to the reform bills, was a successful physician from Scotland and a sub-
stantial citizen. All these townspeople had invested in the existing slave-
holding society. Their involvement in circulating documents criticizing
matters before the assembly suggests such voters’ continuing interest in
current legislation. It also indicates that even if assemblymen were reluc-
tant to supply them with copies of their draft bills, the electors in
Spanish Town, where the assembly met, and at Kingston, thirteen miles
away, still had a fair idea what was under discussion and could have
strong feelings about legislative innovations.53
Such townspeople might sign hostile petitions for several reasons. As
Winthrop D. Jordan pointed out, slave laws constrained white slave-
holders because “the law told the white man, not the Negro, what he
must do.”54 Making all allowance for exaggerations in hostile descrip-
tions, the Spanish Town petition’s objection to a new court to be erected
where slaveholders could be tried may indicate associations with military
tribunals, and the “high Court of Inquisition” description suggests that
the bill had aimed to give teeth to the courts that heard cases involving
52 Dec. 10, 1757, 1B/11/18/21, fol. 90, Jamaica Archives (“gent.”); Port Royal
Street, in Kingston Parish Tax, 1750, 2/6/2, fol. 103, ibid. (“gentleman”). See also
Port Royal Street, in Kingston Parish Tax, 1751, 2/6/2, fol. 236, ibid., though by then
Conyers Dobby was dead. The manuscript is damaged, but in 1750 another landlord
on the same street was surnamed “Dobby”; the tax list places Dobby on East Street, in
Kingston Parish Tax, 1750, 2/6/2, fol. 91, ibid. In 1750 Dobby’s inventory added up to
less than a hundred pounds (probably in depreciated Jamaica currency). See Aug. 29,
1750, 1B/11/3/30, fols. 36v–37, ibid. In 1757 Archibald Willock was posthumously
described as “gentleman.” This attribution looks less certain. Letters Testamentary
issued after Willock’s brother refused to serve as executor describe Archibald as “gent.”
(Dec. 10, 1757, 1B/11/18/21, fol. 90, ibid.), though Willock was not given this status
during his lifetime in another instance when his brother would not serve (estate of
John Anderson, May 22, 1755, 1B/11/18/4, fol. 44, ibid.).
53 On Robert Dallas, see Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 128–29 (May 28,
June 2, 1748); James Dallas, The History of the Family of Dallas: And Their
Connections and Descendants from the Twelfth Century (Edinburgh, 1921), 347,
495–96.
54 Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro,
1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1968), 108.

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
slaves. 55 Protests by Jamaica’s whites against any legislation permitting
courts to recognize slaves’ oaths, however, proved effective in blocking
either the formation of a new slave court or the extension of effective
new powers to existing courts.
Subsequent efforts to reform the laws relating to cruelty toward slaves
were redirected into a legislative cul-de-sac. In 1751, during Trelawny’s
final session as governor, Jamaica’s House of Assembly passed a bill to
revise the island’s 1696 slave law by increasing its punishments so that a
white person convicted of “wittingly, wantonly, or bloody-mindedly”
killing “a Negroe or Slave” became guilty of a felony and was liable to
imprisonment.56 On conviction offenders would also be liable to pay sixty
pounds (Jamaican currency) to compensate the slave’s owner and second
offenders could be sentenced to death. Given the lack of convictions
under the existing statute, these additional penalties remained a thin legal
reed to deter the ferocity of individual overseers and owners toward the
enslaved people under their control. The 1751 enactment did not go as far
as the 1748 proposal had outlined in restraining the maltreatment of
slaves; it did not ensure that any of the provisions protecting slaves already
in the island’s statute book could be enforced by recognizing the testi-
mony of the victims of such maltreatment.57
Cudjoe’s petition aimed to mobilize white public opinion in Kingston
against the proposed act to recognize slaves’ testimony during the 1748
assembly session. Its assertions that the new bill would subject slave
masters to the enslaved and maybe arm them or else provoke a major
uprising were written to incite people to sign the Kingston petition, and
it therefore remains a rare example of the popular political discourse of
mid-eighteenth-century free white Jamaica. The assemblymen judged
Smith’s composition to be “a false, scandalous, malicious, and seditious
libel, most villainously misrepresenting the character and behaviour of
several of the members of this house, and injurious to the honour and
authority of this house; tending to alienate the minds of the people from,
box 3, folder 55, r (quotation); Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 120–21 (May 12,
14, 1748). I am grateful to David Konig for suggesting the possible echoes of military
tribunals in James Smith’s choice of Latin phrases. For a discussion of the proce-
dures followed in the island’s existing slave courts, see Diana Paton, “Punishment,
Crime, and the Bodies of Slaves in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica,” Journal of Social
History 34, no. 4 (Summer 2001): 923–54.
56 “An Act to explain Part of an Act, entituled, An Act for the better Order and
Government of Slaves; and for inflicting further and other Punishment on Persons
killing Negroes or Slaves,” Acts of Assembly, 337–38 (quotation, 337).
57 The 1751 law’s terms, ibid. Dismissing its effectiveness, Elsa V. Goveia, “The
West Indian Slave Laws of the Eighteenth Century,” Revista de Ciencias Sociales 4,
no. 1 (March 1960): 75–105, esp. 88.

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
and to incense them against, their representatives; to excite mutiny and

disorder; and to destroy the well-being of this island, and the inhabitants
thereof.”58 On these grounds they requested the governor to order the
attorney general to prosecute Smith for writing this essay. The threat of
prosecution by Attorney General Penny, himself defamed in Cudjoe’s
petition, finally brought Smith to submit. After apologizing and paying
his accumulated legal fees, he was allowed to go free. The survival of later
libelous epigrams by Smith shows that this incident failed to restrain his
satiric efforts.59
The wider political interests stirred up by Cudjoe’s petition high-
light a range of opinions circulating in mid-eighteenth-century Kingston
on the repercussions of the proposal for enforcing the existing protec-
tion clauses in Jamaica’s slave laws. The petition’s arguments may not
have reflected opinions that enslaved people actually held, but the satire
does more than merely reveal white fears about black empowerment. It
also demonstrates the centrality of legal privileges and oaths in shaping
white Christian identities in mid-eighteenth-century Jamaica, hints at
the biblical rationales for slavery in general circulation, and perhaps
indicates fissures in white society produced by some Christians’ antago-
nism toward the island’s Jewish community.
The decisive case against instituting the proposed court was made
beyond the assembly’s doors, among a wider white public whose social
and legal status depended on the privileges whiteness brought them.
Once the project provoked such external hostility, its legislative support
evaporated. Assemblymen took their electors’ fears seriously. Here
“Cudjoe’s” reference to the governor’s influence struck sensitive nerves.
Assemblymen rallied to defend fellow members from such assertions.
But Manning’s anger flared because the claims were probably true: this
project was recommended by the governor and introduced by two of his
allies. Seven years earlier Trelawny had proposed a scheme “for the abol-
ishing slavery, & putting the Negroes upon some such foot as the
ancient villains of England were.” 60 The plan came to nothing, but
Trelawny’s continued service as governor left open the possibility that
58Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 127 (May 26, 1748).
59 For the ordering of James Smith’s prosecution, ibid., 4: 126 (May 26, 1748).
See also a message from the assembly to Governor Edward Trelawny, May 27, 1748,
ibid., 4: 127–28. For Smith’s submission and petition for relief, see Journals of the
Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 126–27, 130 (May 27, July 6, 1748). The assembly voted not
to reduce the fees he was obliged to pay. Thomas Thistlewood transcribed these epi-
grams in 1777. See “Notes made while reading books,” Monson 31/75, fols. 179–85,
Lincolnshire Records Office, Lincoln, Eng. April Shelford alerted me to this item.
60 Edward Trelawny to Duke of Newcastle, May 27, 1741, in MS 306, National
Library of Jamaica, Kingston (quotation). See also Trelawny to “Sir,” June 1, 1741,
ibid. I am grateful to April Shelford for sharing her transcriptions.

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
with new legislation the sections of Jamaica’s legal code that defended
slaves might actually be enforced.61
Trelawny continued to criticize the island’s slaveholders. In 1750 he
invoked an array of arguments against extending slavery to Jamaica’s
dependent territory on the Mosquito Shore (today’s eastern Honduras),
claiming that “the English in general are the worst Managers of Slaves of
any People under the Sun” because “they will observe no Discipline.” Here
the issue was the English lack of self-discipline. Though there might be
“many wholesome Regulations enacted in this Island for the Government
of Slaves . . . as they can be enforced only by due Course of Law, they are
not and cannot be enforced at all, and every one in fact, does as he lists
with his own Slaves.”62 Those laws could be modified but, as Trelawny’s
comments suggest, without recognizing slave testimony in court they
remained dead letters. The 1751 act tweaking the island’s slave laws may
have eased legislators’ consciences, but it did nothing to stop the violence
because it avoided the basic issue of securing evidence to prosecute whites
who breached the protective clauses in the slave laws.
Reconsidering this mid-eighteenth-century legislative dispute in
Jamaica offers fresh perspectives on the routes that policies to mitigate
slavery could follow elsewhere in Britain’s empire. The development of a
metropolitan conscience about slavery in the late eighteenth century
proved a decisive factor, but colonial fears continued to prompt propos-
als to ameliorate the practice of slaveholding to prevent revolts. The
1748 attempt to have slaves’ evidence heard in Jamaican courts failed,
and subsequent agendas for reform ignored this solution until the 1820s,
when it still proved too contentious. Local attempts to rein in brutality
continued, with individual legislatures banning amputations and castra-
tions or limiting the number of lashes permitted at a single whipping.
Such measures addressed the symptoms, not the disease. They were
unenforceable without slaves’ evidence. Despite the defensive provisions
in colonies’ slave laws, the basic issue of maltreatment, which the 1748
Jamaican bill attempted to address, remained unresolved.63
61 Assemblyman William Hall described Robert Dallas’s arrest as initiated by
Edward Manning. See W. Hall to T. Hall, May 21, 1748, in Barnett/Hall Collection,
MS 220, box 1, folder 26. Whether Trelawny’s support for the 1748 scheme was
widely known during the assembly session is unclear. A pamphlet published in
London a year later stated that the governor had “contriv’d this Scheme.” See A
Letter to Mrs. P[hillip]S. In which some Facts in her last Number are rescued from the
false Light she has put them in, and some others which she has omitted, are supply’d
(London, 1749), 9–10 (quotation, 10).
62 Edward Trelawny to Earl of Bedford, Apr. 14, 1750, CO 137/48, fol. 196,
National Archives (quotations).
63 On amelioration, see Elsa Goveia, “Amelioration and Emancipation in the
British Caribbean,” March 1977, in West Indies Collection, Pam. HT1093.G62,
University Library, University of the West Indies, Mona, Kingston, Jamaica; J. R.
Ward, British West Indian Slavery, 1750–1834: The Process of Amelioration (Oxford,

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
Perhaps the key to securing legislation that offered slaves some pro-
tection was to ensure that such measures could be depicted as benefiting
whites rather than making concessions to the slaves. In 1784 the widely
read critique of West Indian slavery penned by the Reverend James
Ramsay, a former Anglican rector in Saint Kitts, claimed to find no
clause “in all our colony acts . . . enacted to secure [the slaves] the least
humane treatment, or to save them from the capricious cruelty of an
ignorant, unprincipled master, or a morose, unfeeling overseer.” He con-
cluded that any vindication of slavery would have to show “that slaves
have an adequate remedy, either in law, opinion, or interest . . . against
the parsimony, insensibility, prejudices, meanness, ignorance, spite, and
cruelty of their owners and overseers.”64 An earlier draft also included
slaveholders’ “lust,” “malice,” and “caprice.” 65 But there were a few
modest improvements. Ramsay himself described “a law, that Governor
Leake got enacted in Nevis, to distinguish petty larceny in slaves from
felony.”66 Remarkably, Governor William Gooch got the legal privilege
of “benefit of clergy” extended in Virginia “to any Negro, mulatto or
Indian” in the early 1730s, which enabled first offenders of all races to
escape the death penalty for many felonies.67 A further amendment to
1988). In undertaking prosecutions for maltreatment, witnesses remained an issue.

For an 1810 Nevis incident in which, though five magistrates were among the crowd
who watched a succession of excessive whippings given in the Charlestown market-
place, a week later a local jury still acquitted the planter who ordered them, see
Folarin Shyllon, James Ramsay: The Unknown Abolitionist (Edinburgh, 1977), 63. The
newspaper that published a resolution by Nevis’s assembly condemning the planter’s
brutality was fined for libel. See Vincent K. Hubbard, Swords, Ships and Sugar:
History of Nevis to 1900 (Corvallis, Ore., 1996), 118–20. See also a proplanter descrip-
tion of a subsequent flogging ordered by the same planter, which again broke an
island law against sentences of a hundred or more lashes, in The Case in Nevis, 1817
([London, 1818]), 1–22.
64 James Ramsay, An Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in
the British Sugar Colonies (London, 1784), 63 (“in all our colony acts”), 287–98 (“that
slaves have,” 298).
65 Brown, Moral Capital, 243.
66 Ramsay, Essay on the Treatment and Conversion, 62–63. This law is probably
Clause 7, “In what Cases Slaves not to suffer Death,” in the 1737 “Act to amend,
explain, and make more effectual an Act made in the Fourth Year of the Reign of
King George the First, intitled, An Act for the good Government of Negroes, and
other Slaves in this Island,” Acts of Assembly Passed in the Island of Nevis, from 1664, to
1739, inclusive (London, 1740), 133.
67 John M. Hemphill II, “Aggie, Mary,” in John T. Kneebone et al., eds.,
Dictionary of Virginia Biography (Richmond, Va., 1998), 1: 42–43. William Gooch’s
efforts from 1728 to 1732 involved two court cases and an act of Virginia’s General
Assembly. See Philip J. Schwarz, “Forging the Shackles: The Development of
Virginia’s Criminal Code for Slaves,” in Ambivalent Legacy: A Legal History of the
South, ed. David J. Bodenhamer and James W. Ely Jr. (Jackson, Miss., 1984),
125–46, esp. 132.

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
the Barbados slave laws in 1739 referred all death sentences to the governor
and council for review but did so under the guise of protecting owners’
property rights against malicious prosecutions and hence defending the
island’s treasury from making unnecessary compensation payments.68
In 1748 Trelawny and his local allies found themselves vulnerable to
popular criticism. White settlers’ understandings of their legal and social
status remained deeply vested in the slave-owning status quo. Well
before metropolitan reformers sought to intervene in colonial affairs,
policy makers faced white popular resistance to any attempts by political
authorities to interfere with the power of the slaveholder over his or her
property and, more generally, of white over black. The proposal to rec-
ognize slave testimony threatened both of these. The reform might
appear reasonable, but it was always too tendentious to pass. To consider
what constituted “the politics of slavery” in slaveholding colonies, schol-
ars must recognize political questions that could not be settled alongside
topics where legislative change was an option. 69 Colonial legislatures
remained key venues for attempting to alter the governance of slavery,
and local assemblies did consider some adjustments. But, as a persistent
counterweight, the deeply rooted assumptions about law, freedom, and
privilege that legislators shared with their white electorates continued to
define what individual assemblies would—or would not—change.70
The failure of an early effort to enforce the execution of Jamaica’s
slave laws shows that even at the apogee of the West Indian sugar planters’
local influence, a project backed by a respected governor, his attorney gen-
eral, and leading local politicians came to grief once it provoked external
opposition among the white electorate. Though narrow political cliques
monopolized the wheeling and dealing of assembly politics in eighteenth-
century Jamaica and the rest of the West Indies, this legislative defeat sug-
gests that even the most self-assured governor, councilors, and assemblymen
68 For the Barbados law, see “An Act for amending An Act of this Island, enti-
tled, ‘An Act for the “governing of Negroes;”’ . . . ,” Feb. 27, 1739, in Hall, Acts, Passed
in . . . Barbados, 323–25; Watson, “Capital Sentences against Slaves,” 199, 205–7.
69 Christopher L. Brown, “The Politics of Slavery,” in The British Atlantic
World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York, 2002),
214–32.
70 Voting by Jewish residents was another political dead end. During the
Jamaica assembly’s 1750 session, a further petitioning campaign blocked an attempt
by a Jamaican Jew to vote in assembly elections with hostile petitions to the assem-
bly from Kingston, suburban Saint Andrew parish, and Spanish Town. See Holly
Snyder, “Rules, Rights and Redemption: The Negotiation of Jewish Status in British
Atlantic Port Towns, 1740–1831,” Jewish History 20, no. 2 (June 2006): 147–70. On
slaveholders’ views of freedom, see Jack P. Greene, “‘Slavery or Independence’:
Some Reflections on the Relationship among Liberty, Black Bondage, and Equality
in Revolutionary South Carolina,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 80, no. 3 (July
1979): 193–214; Greene, Slavery and Abolition 21: 1–31.

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
could not override the perceived self-interest of the islands’ wider free
white society. It also demonstrates that reforms that might seem feasible
to members of the Governor’s Council, leading merchants in Kingston,
or even a possible majority of assemblymen still extended too far for
petition-signing white townspeople. Though only a few whites enjoyed
the right to vote, whites’ fears counted in island politics. It was a nega-
tive influence, but a potent one.
Petition of Negro Slaves, 174871

To the honourable72 Edward Manning Esq:r & his associates
Representatives of the Town of Kingston &c &c73
The humble Petition of the innocent distressed sons of Christ,74 (com-

monly called the negro slaves) of the said Town and precinct, in behalf
of them selves, and one hundred and six thousand of their Bretheren,
unjustly and in humanly 75 detained in Thraldom and Bondage in the
Island of Jamaica
Sheweth
71 This transcription is of the earliest surviving version of “Petition of Negro
Slaves,” May 9, 1748, in Barnett/Hall Collection, MS 220, box 3, folder 55, which
William Hall presumably obtained from one of the Clerk of Assembly’s clerks.
Paragraphing, punctuation, and spelling in the transcription all follow that text. For
its creation and that of the other three surviving versions, in the assembly’s manu-
script journals (heretofore referred to as 1B/5/1/13, fols. 412–15, Jamaica Archives),
the Colonial Office records (CO 140/34), and the Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica,
4: 122–23, see footnote 3. Though the transcription is broadly similar to the other
surviving copies, comparisons among these texts highlight the heavy-handed editing
imposed to regularize capitalization and punctuation in the 1797 volume of the
Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica (which also left out some of the marginal proce-
dural annotations that gave additional plausibility to the copies that had circulated
among the assemblymen) and the considerable variation between even an “official
copy” and its subsequent retranscriptions. The published Journals and the transcripts
of official documents sent back to the Board of Trade remain invaluable resources,
but it is helpful to be reminded that they too were assembled from clerks’ copies,
which left room enough for variation and mistranscriptions. In the footnotes to the
transcription, I have given variants from the manuscript and published assembly
journals but have omitted most of the latter’s variant italicizations. I have also given
selected variants from the copy in CO 140/34, though I have not noted variant
ampersands, “ands,” and some capitalizations, which seemed more to indicate a
fairly hasty transcription than to have any independent authority as reflections of
the now-lost original petition and deposition.
72 “Honourable” in CO 140/34, which copies the address as one line.
73 1B/5/1/13, fol. 412, Jamaica Archives, has marginal annotation: “The one inti-
tled a petition, &c.”
74 “Chus,” ibid.; CO 140/34; Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 122.
75 “Inhumanly” in CO 140/34.

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
That whereas your Petitioners have heard that your Honours friend
Patron and Partner by the hand of Robert Penny Esq:r hath brought in a
bill intitled an act to make us evidences sufficient on our bare word (as
we know not the meaning of an oath)76 to take from our unjust Masters
the white men of this island their liberty & property and to take from
them that shelter to which for so many years they have 77 Fled a Fair
Tryal by78 Juries and lawfull witnesses, and that none but your Friends
& ours shall have the hearing of their cause. i.e. Your Patron & four of
his Creatures for such purposes chiefly created, and that our Egyptian
Taskmasters79 shall be deeply fined, imprisoned & forefit their right to our
servitude (now no more to be deemed slavery) and that not only by their
own faults, insults or violences80 offered to81 the antient Descendants of
the Grandson of the Patriarch Noah.82 but also by the like faults, insults
or violences offered us by their overseers attorneys or attorneys overseers,
and that all Negr slaves or whites shall be good evidences against them,
& refusing to give Evidence shall be imprison’d ti’l83 they can think on
something to say against our white Masters Mistresses overseers or attor-
neys or servants by them set to confuse us,84 and that this high Court of
Inquisition for our relief & freedom which your Nation85 hath always
flattered us with shall be a Inqueriy virate Quorum Tres,86 for reducing
by our means artifices & informations, the abominable pride of any
white man who shall ever hearafter complain at home of you or your
faction87 &c &c &c.
76 Parentheses altered, ibid.: “(on our bare word) as we Know not the Meaning
of an Oath.”
77 Rendered “had,” ibid.
78 Interlined.
79 “Task’s Masters” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 413, Jamaica Archives; “task Masters” in
CO 140/34; “task-masters” in Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 122.
80 “Violence” in CO 140/34.
81 “Offered to us,” ibid.
82 A semicolon in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 413, Jamaica Archives; a comma in CO 140/34
and Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 122.
83 “Imprisoned till” in CO 140/34.
84 Rendered “by them set on to misuse us” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 413, Jamaica
Archives; CO 140/34; Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 122.
85 “Patron” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 413, Jamaica Archives, and CO 140/34; “patron” in
Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 122.
86 “Quinquemvirate Quorum tres” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 413, Jamaica Archives, and
CO 140/34; “quinquemvirate quorum tres” in Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4:
122. Latin fragments rendered incorrectly in the transcribed document were cor-
rected in the Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica.
87 Rendered “patron” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 413, Jamaica Archives, and Journals of the
Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 122.

ff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff:ffff on Thu, 01 Jan 1976 12:34:56 UTC
and whereas we hear a petition of the white men will be presented

to be heard against the passing of this88 Bill (tho’ you was so godd89 as
served90 the motion for it’s91 being read twice ni92 the same day & for
passing which we have reason to believe for your patrons sake you would
have voted without reading at all) which if granted will prevent our get-
ting possession of the promised land, now by your and your patron’s
means clearly in view, Contrary to our natural rights as men, contrary
also to your darling Constitution of Britain Contrary to Religion &
Morality & finally contrary to Equity & good Conscience.
And whereas You and your patron have framed a bill to put all
Mulattoes free or slaues on a footnig93 as to their oaths informations goods
&94 libertys95 Persons & liues with the people of this Island called Jews.
The premises considered, and as this Island (as in the Speech)96 will
never flourish till white people are sufficiently encouraged to come &
Settle in it, which can never be so well effected as by subjecting the white
Masters to the Black slaves & bringing about by our means an extirpation
of the Jews, your Petitioners beg leaue to desire you to ad97 this further
clause to this98 Bill—and be it further enacted by the authority aforsaid
that all arms & amunition shall be for the future in every plantation &c
lodged, ni99 the Black drivers or favourite Negroes house, ni100 order per
Purim to prevent the violence101 aforesaid and that the negroe slaves to all
intents & purposes be deemed as good sufficient & lawful witnesses
88 Rendered “the” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 413, Jamaica Archives; CO 140/34; Journals

of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 122.
89 Good.
90 “Second” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 413, Jamaica Archives; CO 140/34; Journals of the
Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 122.
91 CO 140/34 and Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 122, omit the phrase
“for it’s.”
92 In.
93 Footing.
94 Ampersand omitted in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 413, Jamaica Archives; CO 140/34;
95 “Liberty” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 413, Jamaica Archives, and CO 140/34; “liberty” in
96 Probably Governor Edward Trelawny’s speech to the Speaker and assembly
at the opening of the session on Apr. 14, 1748. There Trelawny “recommended” to
the assembly’s “most serious consideration . . . the want of white inhabitants.” See
97 Rendered “add” in CO 140/34.
98 Rendered “the” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 414, Jamaica Archives; CO 140/34; Journals
of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 122.
99 In.
100 In.
101 “Violences” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 414, Jamaica Archives; “violences” in Journals of
the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 122.

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
against the said people called Jews as the mulattoes aforsaid & be in all
respects equall [v] to the Jews of this Island in everything relating to their
testimony information goods liberty persons or lives & that Your petition-
ers be tryed only by Juries as the white men formerly were & be nowise
amenable to the high & inquem vizate,102 inqisitorias as by the act the
Jews & other white men are made, that for the future all negro slaves be
tryed by 12 pares103 & otherwise favour’d & relieved as to the premises104
into105 your and Patrons great humanity shall seem meet.
And your petitioners shall ever pray &c &c &c
The mark +106 Cudjoe for Kingston negroes &c107 Cudjoe saith the
above petition is true to108 his knowledge & further saith not.
The mark X of109 Cudjoe sworn before me May 9th110 1748
Vera Copia111 &c. N.B. Sixty thousand ready to favor
The passing112 of the bill or more if required.
Jamaica, Sir113
Thomas French of the parish of Kingston Merchant make the oath114
that on or about the ninth day of May instant as this deponent was passing
102 Rendered “high Quinquem Virate Inquisition” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 414, Jamaica
Archives, and CO 140/34; “quin quemvirate” in Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 123.
103 The word “pares” is underlined in CO 140/34.
104 “Pre:ms” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 414, Jamaica Archives; “Premises” in CO 140/34.
105 Rendered “as to” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 414, Jamaica Archives; CO 140/34;
106 The word “of” is interlined in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 414, Jamaica Archives, and CO
140/34. Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 123, sets, “The mark” over the cross
and “of” beneath it.
107 Rendered “of” in CO 140/34.
108 The phrase “the best of” is interlined, ibid.
109 Interlined.
110 “19th” in CO 140/34 and Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 123. The non-
sensical date of May 19, 1748, which suggests the petition was composed the day
after it was presented to the assembly, appears to have resulted from a potentially
misleading pen stroke in the final “y” of “May” in the manuscript journals. The
transcription’s date of May 9 seems more likely, given the date scheduled for the
debate on the bill to resume. On another mistranscription from the 1735 assembly jour-
nals, transforming “Nanny” into “hanged,” see Kamau Brathwaite, “Nanny, Palmares
and the Caribbean Maroon Connexion,” in Maroon Heritage: Archaeological
Ethnographic and Historical Perspectives, ed. E. Kofi Agorsah (Kingston, Jamaica,
1994), 119–38, esp. 124–25.
111 That is, “a true copy.” CO 140/34 inserts “E.M.,” presumably for Edward
Manning.
112 “Carry the Passing” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 414, Jamaica Archives; “Carry the Pass:g”
in CO 140/34; “carry the passing” in Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 123.
113 1B/5/1/13, fol. 414, Jamaica Archives, adds a marginal note: “And further giv-
ing Mr. French’s Deposition annexed to ye petition.” In the Journals of the Assembly
of Jamaica, 4: 123, “ss.” replaces “Sir.”
114 Rendered “maketh Oath” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 414, Jamaica Archives, and Journals
of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 123; “Maketh Oath” in CO 140/34.

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC
by the Court house of the said parish he saw a Crowd of people con-
cerned115 therein, & that Archibald116 Willock of said parish wharfinger
standing on something that raised him above the people, was reading the
paper writing herein117 annexed, & that having read part thereof, One Mr.
Conyers Dobby said that was not the Business they were meet118 about or
words to that effect upon which said Willock handed it down upon which
this deponent took it & brought it away with him out of the hands119 of
said Willock & further this deponent saith that he is well acquainted with
the handwriting of James Smith Doctor of Physick of said parish (having
oftentimes seen him write) & that he verily120 believes the same to be all
the hand writing of said Smith.
T:hos121 French
May the 13th 1748
Sworn before me
Chas:122 Price
Copia Vera123
Thomas Cross Cl:124 to the Assembly
115 Rendered “convened” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 414, Jamaica Archives, and Journals of
the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 123; “Convened” in CO 140/34.
116 CO 140/34 inserts “one” to make “that one Archibald.”
117 A marginal note here reads, “The original was annexed.” Rendered “here-
unto” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 414, Jamaica Archives; CO 140/34; Journals of the Assembly of
Jamaica, 4: 123.
118 Rendered “there met” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 414, Jamaica Archives; CO 140/34;
119 Rendered “hand” in CO 140/34.
120 “Very” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 415, Jamaica Archives, and CO 140/34.
121 Thomas.
122 Charles.
123 “Copia Vera” not included in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 415, Jamaica Archives; CO
140/34; Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, 4: 123.
124 Clerk.

202.112.129.248 on Thu, 30 Mar 2023 08:32:16 UTC

2010 - A 1748 "Petition of Negro Slaves" and The Local Politics of Slavery in Jamaica

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

2010 - A 1748 "Petition of Negro Slaves" and The Local Politics of Slavery in Jamaica

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

A 1748 “Petition of Negro Slaves” and the Local Politics of Slavery in Jamaica

Author(s): James Roberston

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5309/willmaryquar.67.2.319

This content downloaded from

James Robertson is a senior lecturer in history in the Department of History

This content downloaded from

illuminate an otherwise unexpected political controversy over a Jamaican

This content downloaded from

then began to channel criticism back to Britain. A few residents in other

This content downloaded from

brutality. After transcribing several of these laws, merchant-historian

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

and religious “liberty” that defined English and Anglo-Jamaican asser-

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

The petition’s exaggerations became increasingly extreme with the

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

and to incense them against, their representatives; to excite mutiny and

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

1988). In undertaking prosecutions for maltreatment, witnesses remained an issue.

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

Petition of Negro Slaves, 174871

The humble Petition of the innocent distressed sons of Christ,74 (com-

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

and whereas we hear a petition of the white men will be presented

88 Rendered “the” in 1B/5/1/13, fol. 413, Jamaica Archives; CO 140/34; Journals

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

This content downloaded from

You might also like